Until lately, I haven’t thought much about composting. It always seemed like a messy business and I wasn’t sure exactly how you goes about making compost.  But according to the EPA, yard trimmings and food residuals together constitute 26 percent of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream.  That is a lot of useful material going to landfills. So I decided it was time to get educated.

There are a lot of important benefits to composting:

• Compost enriches soils
• Compost helps prevent pollution
• Using compost reduces the need for water, fertilizers and pesticides

So what can go into a compost bin?  Just about anything organic, including food scraps, wood waste, shredded junk mail, egg shells (even egg cartons), vegetable peelings, all kinds of yard waste and lots more.   The folks over at Garden Organic have some great tips on how make really rich compost out of everyday stuff that would otherwise get thrown out and wind up at the dump.

You can find plenty of composting tools for sale to help you get started.  But you can also do what this video suggests and create a compost bin out of a trash can or plastic kitchen garbage pail.

Gardening Flowers & Vegetables : Making a Compost Bin From a Trash Can

The key is to get started!  So start converting your organic waste into a rich mulch that your plants will love.  Here is a short slide show with projects that will help educate your kids (and you!) about composting.

We’ve talked about the gigantic problem of plastic bags and plastics in landfills here at Pushkin’s Planet already.  I don’t want to imply that every use of plastic is bad.  Plastics have played a major role in many industries – e.g. medicine.  They are helping in situations like the earthquake crisis in Haiti.  But there are many situations where we don’t need to use plastic and can make a personal choice not to.  One big example is water sold in plastic bottles at the grocery store.

All you have to do is remember that all of those bottles are made from fossil fuels (oil).  As it was pointed out on “Drinking Water: Bottled or From the Tap” on the  Kids National Geographic site, just imagine each of those water bottles one-quarter full of oil—that’s how much oil it takes to just make one bottle!  There has been a lot of talk about peak oil recently.  Peak oil just refers to a situation where we can’t produce any more oil no matter what the demand.  So conserving our use of plastic helps us save on the amount of oil we consume which could become very important in the years ahead.

Besides finding out about how your community recycles plastic bottles (do they ask you to separate them from paper and put them with empty glass containers for recycling), you can also try to stop using so many of the water bottles and just get your own personal water bottle to take with you everywhere and refill with regular tap water which is safe.

Let me hear from you about other ways to stop filling up landfills with plastic bottles that aren’t biodegradable.  We’ve got to think about fixing these problems now so that future generations can enjoy our beautiful planet.  We all have to help, even in one little way.