By composting your kitchen and yard waste at home you can help prevent the release of harmful greenhouse gases (GHGs) that cause climate change. Here's how:

• Composting your kitchen and yard waste at home means fewer truck loads of waste transported to a landfill or industrial composting facility which means fewer fossil fuels are burnt and less GHGs emitted.
• When your home compost is properly aerated (i.e. if you turn it to make sure it gets enough air) the decomposition process produces much less methane than materials left to decompose in a landfill.
• When you use your homemade compost you don't have to make as many trips to the garden store for soil and fertilizer. This reduces GHG emissions from cars.
• Using your homemade compost helps prevent the GHGs that are emitted in the production, packaging and transportation of fertilizers and soils.
• When you add your compost to your garden, you are returning all the carbon that was in your food scraps and yard waste back to the soil. Adding compost to your soil provides the necessary nutrients for the growth of trees and plants, which in turn absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen through photosynthesis.
• Adding compost to your soil improves soil quality and allows you to grow more food in your garden reducing your need buy produce that may have been shipped over long distances.

So, by composting we not only reduce the amount of harmful green house gases released into the atmosphere, but by nourishing trees and plants we also aid the process of removing CO² (a GHG) from the atmosphere.