Why Compost?

Composting produces a useful soil conditioner for your garden. Adding compost to your soil helps it retain water better, loosens up heavy soils, and improves plant health.

Composting reduces the amount of garden waste you discard in the trash, and this saves you the expense of extra trash cans. Green wastes-including grass clippings, leaves, weeds, and shrub prunings-can be a large portion of the waste discarded from a single-family home — especially during the spring, summer, and fall months.

Composting reduces the amount of waste sent to landfill. This preserves landfill space-a limited resource. This also helps your community in its effort to meet the waste reduction goals of State Law AB 939. AB 939 requires all communities in California to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill by 50% by the end of the year 2000. Communities that don't make significant progress towards achieving this goal can face fines of up to $10,000 per day from the State.

The simple ethic of "waste not, want not" requires that we make the best use of all our resources. Leaves, grass, and other green wastes can be turned into a useful product. These materials don't belong in a landfill. Throwing these materials in the trash is a true waste of resources.