It’s estimated that 268 million tons of food waste are generated in the States every year, and around 28% of that is compostable. When those compostable food scraps end up in the landfill, they emit the greenhouse gas methane — a nasty air pollutant that’s directly related to climate change.
Composting scraps instead of tossing them has a significant impact on the amount of methane emitted from landfills. If every household in the U.S. composted, it’d remove the equivalent of over 7 million cars from the road each year.
Statistics aside, if you’re a seasoned composter, you’re probably familiar with the things you can safely compost — fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, houseplants, cardboard — the list goes on. But there are a bunch of non-food items that will happily rot away in your compost bin, and we want to share them with you. Keep reading for a mega-list of surprisingly compost-friendly items — and a few you maybe thought were compostable, but aren’t.
