Composting to Combat Climate Change

For this semester, we are going to be tasked with a new project: 20 Time. 20 Time is a project where we as individuals will work towards solving a problem that we, or the world, have, by spending 20% of our time in this class working towards achieving that goal. When brainstorming what exactly to do for my project, I started to question, "What has been bothering me in my life lately, and what can I do to change that?". I settled on the reoccurring guilt that I had for the food scraps that my family had to throw away in more plastic bags that would end up staying in landfills pretty much forever. Therefore my topic for this project will be reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere(specifically methane) to try and "combat climate change" by reducing the amount of organic wastes that go into our landfills.

Seeing as certain people in society today try to disclaim the impact that we as humans have on the environment in general, I wanted to bring this issue to the forefront and demonstrate ways of helping this problem by establishing my own system of composting and sharing some results of what I have found along my journey. "How does composting exactly relate to climate change?" one may ask. Well, by creating a compost system for biodegradable items, you can take out the amount of "organic waste"(or waste originating biologically) that goes into landfills and decomposes anaerobically to create the greenhouse gas methane. Not only does it help take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, but composting can also be used for better water retention in the soil and most obviously, for enriching gardens.

My goal by the end of this project will be to learn more about composting (enough to share with my family and the class to encourage them to start their own compost bins), have a fully functional example that I can show to the class by the end of the semester, and be able to use the compost to possibly create a garden of some sort at home. The way that I will measure my progress for this project will be through my blog, where I will be updating anything from recent contact that I have made with with various organizations or experts, to calculations on how much greenhouse gases I have taken out of the atmosphere, to pictures that document the process of my composting journey. Moving forward, I plan to have figured out what type of compost bin I will be creating, attain the necessary materials to build it, and start building by the time I post again(approximately 2 weeks or so).