Environmental Benefits of Recycling and Composting

Often times when clearing up your garden you might wonder what to do with all the accumulated waste. If you ask someone, you get the most popular choices – get a skip hire and throw everything away, use waste removal services to take care of it for you, recycle it, or use it as compost. Two of those answers – recycling the waste and using it for compost – are quite the practical ones. But people are often confused as to their differences since both of them involve the breakdown of waste.

Here is the main difference: recycling means breaking down waste into ingredients for creating something new; composting means breaking down waste into biodegradable elements which you use to fertilize your garden. The only question that remains is – which should you choose when clearing up the garden?

Recycling has been, and will always be an eco-friendly option. Choosing to send waste, such as plastic, glass or polyethylene items, for recycling means that it will not find itself on the top of a trash heap, waiting to be burned, or just staying there, emitting its rotten gases to the surrounding environment, and polluting its surroundings. Recycling means being green, reusing the raw materials for something new instead of waiting for the piles of rubbish to emit their gases and start creating environmental problems to nature and respiratory problems to people and animals.

Composting is a slightly harder thing to do, since you need to be aware which of the parts of rubbish are biodegradable and will be able to make for a fine fertilizer to enrich the soil with. Weeds, for example, can become quite the fertilizers, but you need to be aware of what type of weed can be composted, as some of them never do quite reach the biodegradable stage and only serve as poison to any plant you try to fertilize with them. Luckily, nowadays information about different kinds of weeds can easily be found on the internet, so you can do some research and whether the weeds you have can be used in compost, or should be a subject of junk disposal. Cut grass, fallen leaves, vegetable or fruit leaves and clips are perfect for compost as they are the perfect organic and biodegradable materials you can find in a garden. Expert gardeners are aware of the benefits good compost can have for your garden, the very least of which is not having to buy extra fertilizers or a specific type of soil to plant in. There is also active and passive composting, the latter of which requires a bit more effort, and is trickier to pull off, but if you learn how to do it even the problematic weeds can become great fertilizers for your garden.

Recycling is mostly a communal activity. You should recycle, of course, but a better result is literally felt in the air only if the people around you are doing it too. Recycling means more benefits for nature and a healthier environment for everybody, so the best results come from groups dedicated to always doing it and not only when they are not too busy to sort out their junk.

Composting, on the other hand, is more of a local thing, and only you benefit from it. Well, you and your garden, of course. Successful composting will lead to an excellent organic garden that will never need all the poisonous pesticides and herbicides to keep growing. The fruit or vegetables such a garden produces will definitely be ample and healthy.

These are the differences between composting and recycling. Both involve the reuse of rubbish components, both benefit the environment in their own way, while one is felt domestically and the other one, communally. Now that you are aware of it, start clearing up that garden and make use of all the waste you can gather.