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Dear Dot,
Why can’t you compost cheese, yogurt, or meat?
—Nina Maruca, via email
Can You Compost Cheese?
The question “can you compost cheese?” comes up frequently for home composters looking to reduce food waste. While cheese and other dairy products will technically decompose, adding them to your compost bin or compost pile presents several challenges that make most experts recommend against it.
Cheese contains high levels of fat and protein that break down slowly in the composting process. These rich dairy products can disrupt the proper balance of materials needed for healthy decomposition. When you compost cheese, it often creates an anaerobic environment that produces foul odors and attracts unwanted pests like rodents and flies.
Compost Bin Challenges with Dairy Products
Your standard compost bin isn't designed to handle dairy waste effectively. Cheese and other dairy products can clump together with other organic materials, preventing proper airflow throughout your pile. This disrupts the aerobic decomposition process that transforms food scraps into finished compost.
The fat content in cheese also coats other materials in your compost heap, slowing down the overall decomposition process. Instead of getting nutrient-rich soil amendment in a few months, you might wait much longer for your compost to fully break down.
Compost Meat: Understanding the Risks
When it comes to meat products, the risks multiply. Raw meat and cooked meat both pose health risks when added to backyard composting systems. Meat contains pathogens like E. coli and salmonella that can survive in typical home compost piles and potentially contaminate your garden soil.
Hot Composting Requirements
To safely compost meat, you'd need to maintain high temperatures of 130-160°F consistently for specific periods. This hot composting method requires you to pile frequently monitor temperature and turn your compost regularly. Most home composters find this level of maintenance too demanding for successful results.
Professional composting facilities can handle meat products because they maintain these precise conditions. Your backyard compost pile rarely reaches or sustains these temperatures long enough to eliminate harmful bacteria from meat scraps.
Attract Pests and Animals
Meat products are particularly good at attracting animals to your compost area. Raccoons, rats, and other unwanted visitors will dig through your pile to reach meat scraps. This can scatter your compost materials and create a mess in your yard while potentially bringing disease-carrying pests closer to your home.
Better Alternatives for Food Waste
Instead of composting cheese and meat, focus on suitable organic matter for your compost pile. Coffee grounds, fruit and vegetable scraps, yard waste, and shredded paper provide excellent nitrogen and carbon sources without the risks associated with dairy and meat.
For materials that hold water well, like fresh fruit peels, balance them with dry materials such as wood chips or straw. This creates the right balance your pile needs to decompose efficiently into healthy soil for your garden.
Municipal Composting Programs
Many cities now accept meat and dairy products through municipal composting programs. These facilities have the equipment and expertise to handle challenging materials safely. Check if your area offers food waste collection services as an alternative to throwing these items in the trash.
If you're serious about reducing food waste, consider investing in a food waste processor or keeping meat and dairy scraps frozen until you can take them to appropriate disposal facilities.
Small Pieces and Proper Management
For vegetable-based food scraps, cutting materials into small pieces speeds up decomposition. This technique works well for suitable materials but won't solve the fundamental problems with composting cheese or meat at home.
Focus your home composting efforts on materials that break down safely and efficiently. Your plants will benefit more from consistent, high-quality compost made from appropriate organic materials than from problematic batches that include meat and dairy products.
Remember, the goal of home composting is creating valuable fertilizer while diverting waste from the landfill. Stick to proven materials and methods for the best results in your garden.
Dear Nina,
I am meticulous about clearing my plate. Even so, the occasional meat scrap or piece of cheese evades my stomach. And I feel guilty about tossing those morsels in the trash to rot in a landfill.
While you technically can compost meat and dairy products, a lot can go wrong along the way. The Environmental Protection Agency places meat and dairy on its “What Not to Compost” list along with other items like pet waste, charcoal ash, and diseased plants.
But why? Meat, to start, can attract rodents or pests to your compost bin. Raw meat also could be infected with E.coli or salmonella, which would allow bacteria to spread to crops that touch the compost.
Dairy products also attract pests. And they can cause the food scraps to clump together, creating anaerobic digestion, which results in foul smells.
While there are a few options to compost such items at home, the process is a lot more difficult to get right, especially for the beginner composter. I chatted with Roxanne Kapitan from Garden Wisdom to get her two cents. “The whole goal of composting is to successfully be able to use what you compost in your home garden instead of buying bagged compost from far away using more plastic, more fuel, and all of that,” Kapitan said. Getting in over your head trying to compost meat scraps at home might ultimately be wasteful.
For the composting experts set on adding meat and dairy waste to their pile, the options include hot composting and anaerobic composting. Hot composting requires meticulous attention to keep the pile at 130 to 160 degrees Fahrenheit for a set amount of days. You’ll also have to turn the pile frequently. Anaerobic composting, which takes place in the absence of oxygen, can lead to pungent odors, and its final product is less nutrient-rich than that of aerobic composting. Anaerobic composting also generates much more methane than aerobic composting. In enclosed, large-scale facilities this biogas can be captured and used as an energy source, but in the case of backyard composting the harmful greenhouse gas simply escapes into the atmosphere. Kapitan told me that even her devoted home composting friends sooner or later gave up on composting meat and dairy products — it was just too tricky to get it right and keep the pests and stench away.
But now I’m stuck with moldy cheese that I just discovered in the back of my fridge wondering how I should responsibly dispose of it. The best solution to meat and dairy waste is to simply buy less of it in the first place (this will have numerous other positive environmental impacts too). Only buy as much as you’re going to eat so that you don’t waste it. Still, there will be times when you have some meat scraps left on your plate.
The good news is that Martha’s Vineyard’s Island Grown Initiative accepts meat and dairy scraps at its drop-off locations. Residents can find these sites at all town transfer stations, except for Aquinnah, the Island Grown Farm, and Chappy Ferry Dock. Instead of trying your hand at composting these tricky items at home, Kapitan suggests keeping your scraps in the freezer and, once this collection gets too big, bringing it to a food waste drop-off site. “This is the safest and most foolproof way,” Kapitan says.
Aerobically,
Dot
