Make Your Own Kitchen Composter

You can make a composter for your kitchen quite easily by recycling products you already have. A kitchen counter composter retails for approximately $20-$40 in 2010, but you can make one for the cost of a filter.

Background

To work well, compost needs both moist and dry materials, and it also needs air filtration. You can add kitchen scraps to a bucket of sorts, but the material will not compost well without decent air flow. Furthermore, if the composter has openings, the odor from the composting material will not be so pleasant in the kitchen.

To make a composter for your kitchen, all you need is a plastic container with a lid in which you can create some holes. Then, you add a filter to that lid so that there is adequate air flow, yet no odor leakage.

Materials

Plastic coffee can
Charcoal filter
Glue Gun
Drill (anything to make holes)

To make the composter, just take the lid off the empty coffee container and put some aeration holes into it. Then, take the charcoal filter and hot glue the edges of it to the lid. That's all you have to do! You can get charcoal filters from a hardware store, and sometimes you can find them labeled as compost filters.

The filters themselves may not be fully necessary so long as you tend to the compost by turning it and making sure that there is a good balance between dry and moist materials. In fact, using a coffee can with absolutely no changes to it can serve well as a kitchen composter so long as you are willing to tend to the materials in the can.

Tips

• Turn the compost every once in a while by stirring the materials in it.

• Good compost needs a good balance of wet and dry materials, so add shredded newspaper to very moist
materials, or add some moisture to very dry materials.

• Never add meat or dairy products to your kitchen composter.

• If you don't want to use a charcoal filter, you might try using a dryer sheet between the lid and the compost.

• If you do not want to do much to create a kitchen composter, you can simply use a plain can or container, but only
use it to store kitchen items that you will later transport to an outdoor composter.