Composting for Beginners
Your No-Fuss Guide to Getting Started
Here’s a number that’ll stop you mid-scroll: Australians waste around 312kg of food per person, per year. Clean Up Australia estimates that’s enough edible food to fill the MCG ten times over. Not ideal.
The good news? About half of what ends up in the average household bin can be composted. And composting – despite what some people think – is genuinely simple. No special skills required, no big investment needed. Just a little know-how and the willingness to give it a go.
Let’s strip away the noise and get to the good stuff.
Why Bother Composting?
Beyond reducing the guilt of scraping a perfectly good bunch of wilted silverbeet into the bin, composting has some serious benefits worth knowing about.
Food waste buried in landfill produces methane – a greenhouse gas with around 25 times the warming potential of CO₂, responsible for over 3% of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. When you compost instead, that same organic matter becomes something genuinely useful: rich, nutrient-dense material that feeds your soil, reduces the need for chemical fertilisers, and helps your garden thrive season after season.
It costs nothing to run. It encourages you to grow and eat more vegetables. And it closes a loop that shouldn’t have been broken in the first place.
How Easy Is It to Start?
Honestly? Very. It all begins with a small countertop bin in your kitchen – a simple, odour-controlled vessel where you collect food scraps before transferring them to your main compost system.
Our Ladelle Eco Compost Bin is a great starting point. It has a charcoal filter built into the lid to keep things fresh on your kitchen bench – no smells, no fuss.
If you want to go a step further straight away, the Urbalive Bokashi Kitchen Composter is a brilliant all-in-one system that even handles meat and dairy scraps – something most composting methods can’t do.
Green and Brown: The Only Rule You Really Need to Know
Composting works on a simple principle: balance your materials, and nature does the rest. There are two categories to work with.
- Brown matter (carbon-rich, adds structure): dried leaves, cardboard, paper, non-treated sawdust, straw.
- Green matter (nitrogen-rich, adds moisture and nutrients): fruit and vegetable scraps, eggshells, coffee grounds, tea leaves, fresh garden clippings.
Start your compost with two layers of brown material at the base — this creates drainage and airflow. Then add your green layer on top. From there, keep alternating between the two, add a little manure if you have it, keep it moist (a light water in dry spells does the trick), and cover it over.
Every now and then, give it a turn. Mixing in oxygen is what speeds up the whole process — and keeps things from getting whiffy.
What Can I Actually Put In?
A lot more than you’d think. Fruit and vegie scraps, eggshells, coffee grounds, tea bags, grass clippings, leaves, shredded cardboard and paper — all fair game.
What to leave out: meat, fish, dairy, oily foods, diseased plants, and anything treated with herbicides or pesticides. These either attract pests or introduce things into your compost you don’t want ending up in your soil.
What If My Compost Smells?
A well-maintained compost shouldn’t smell much at all. If it does, there are usually two culprits:
Too much moisture – turn your compost more frequently (at least once a week) to get air moving through it.
Too much green matter – balance it out with more brown material. If you’re adding something particularly wet, always offset it with dry browns.
How Long Does It Take?
Compost is generally ready to use within a couple of months, though this varies depending on your method and how often you turn it. You’ll know it’s ready when it’s dark brown, crumbly, and smells earthy – like rich, healthy soil.
What If I Don’t Have a Garden?
No outdoor space is no reason to skip composting altogether. Many local councils now offer green waste bin collections, and community gardens often maintain compost heaps that welcome donations of organic matter. Check in with your nearest community garden — it’s a great way to get familiar with composting on a larger scale before setting up your own system.
A Note on Our Packaging
We’ve thought about this too. All our packaging is recyclable, and where a product doesn’t carry a “home compostable” logo, it can generally be recycled through standard channels. We’re committed to keeping waste to a minimum from our end – because that’s what we’d expect from the brands we choose ourselves.
Ready to Get Started?
Browse our composting collection – from kitchen bench bins to worm composters and bokashi systems. There’s a setup for every space and every kind of household.
And if you’d like to go deeper, these are worth bookmarking:
Check our composting collection. We have everything you’d need, from bins to tools!
Learn more about composting here:
- Munash Organics blog: Home Composting Basics
- Gardening Australia blog: Composting 101
- Gardening Australia clip: Stop the Stink
