Sustainability & Environment

Lunar New Year decorations are heavy on red, gold, and metallic finishes — most produced from cheap plastic-coated paper or foil-laminated materials. Almost none compost. But traditional alternatives (real paper, real silk, natural dyes) do, and they’re available. Here’s the practical guide.

Kitchen composting is the lowest-friction entry point to composting. Coffee grounds, fruit peels, vegetable trimmings — most kitchens produce 3-5 pounds of compostable scraps weekly. Eleven concrete reasons to start, ranging from soil benefits to trash bag reduction to grocery bill insights.

An unheated garage in a cold climate is a workable but limited compost location for winter. Pile activity slows dramatically below 40°F. Insulated bins, vermicompost, and bokashi all extend the season. Here’s what works, what doesn’t, and what to expect.

An avocado pit can sit in your compost pile for two years and still look like an avocado pit. The fibers are dense, the cellulose is high, and home piles rarely get hot enough to break them down fast. Here’s what to do — chop them, hot compost them, or skip them entirely.

The small bathroom and household items that mostly end up in the trash — tissues, cotton swabs, hair, nail clippings, lint, pencil shavings — are mostly compostable. Most home composters don’t bother because the individual items feel inconsequential. The cumulative diversion is meaningful.

Customer surveys are how businesses find out whether their sustainability efforts are landing with customers. For operations that have switched to compostable foodware, the survey is the feedback loop that turns the operational change into a strategic insight. Here’s how to design surveys that produce useful answers.

Hair and pet fur are nitrogen-rich, compostable inputs. They break down slowly, so most home composters underuse them or skip them entirely. The answer to whether you can compost them is yes — with caveats about volume, layering, and what counts as hair versus what doesn’t.

A dry compost pile doesn’t break down. The fix is more water — but the real answer is understanding why the pile is dry in the first place. Climate, materials, pile size, and design all matter. Diagnose before you dump a hose on it.

Stadium composting programs have moved from novelty to operational standard at many major US venues. The leaders divert 50-90% of stadium waste from landfill, mostly through compostable foodware and organics collection. Nine programs worth knowing about.

Composting in Phoenix or Miami isn’t like composting in Boston. Heat accelerates decomposition but also dries the pile faster, attracts different pests, and can produce unexpected smell problems. The practical guide to hot-climate composting — what works, what doesn’t, and how to adapt standard composting advice to genuinely warm conditions.

Bugs in compost are mostly a good sign — they’re the active decomposers doing the actual work. Sowbugs, earthworms, springtails, soldier fly larvae, beneficial mites. A few visitors are less welcome — fruit flies, fungus gnats, sometimes wasps. The practical guide to what’s living in your pile, what’s healthy, what’s a problem, and what to…

Hot composting and cold composting are different approaches to the same basic biology. Hot composting is faster, gets richer compost, kills weed seeds and pathogens — but takes more work. Cold composting is the lazy approach that still works, just slower. The practical comparison for choosing which approach fits your situation.