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This humble blog records every composting experience done at home by regular Singaporeans on our sunny lil island.

“What is composting?” you may wonder. In simple words, it is an extremely low-cost, natural process that transforms your kitchen, household and garden wastes into valuable and rich fertiliser for plants. When people compost, they turn waste into something useful. Compost makes the soil richer and helps plants to grow. It is also easy to make and use.

How does compost happen? Well, nature is a wonderful recycler! All living things originate from soil, and eventually return back to soil. For example, plants grow and receive nutrients from the soil. When they die, they decompose and eventually return back to the ground. This is the same for all animals too. Animals get their food, energy and nutrients from plants and other living organisms. When they die, they get broken down by decomposers, and eventually return back to the soil as nutrients for other living organisms. In this way, composting is an important and natural kind of recycling.

Why should I compost? Much of what we throw away can either be recycled or composted. In view of the fast-filling Semakau landfill, Singapore needs to massively improve our recycling habits. For a long time, most garbage in Singapore are being incinerated or dumped into landfills. But these are worse options to reduce and dispose trash, as they are costly, exhaustive, and harmful to our health and environment. Home composting is the best option, since it requires no cost at all, is a natural process, and reduces the amount of material that has to be disposed of in the beginning.

So you can make a difference. It may seem that our individual efforts are insignificant, but many problems we face are actually created by individual actions. We do have enormous power to effect change. With composting, we can:

• Help prevent global warming by reducing emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is produced when buried organic waste decompose in landfills.
• Recycle at least half of our trash at home.
• Reduce the amount of trash that is being sent to incinerators and landfills. This also means less pollution in our air, ground and water.
• Composting saves you money – no need to buy fertiliser!
• Compost improves all soil, making plants healthier and stronger. It also holds moisture and nutrients in soil, reducing the need to water and fertilise.
• Compost helps make healthy soils, and healthy soils lead to healthy plants, which also means… healthy people and animals! You and I can become less prone to pest and disease attack.
• It’s fun, easy, and extremely satisfying!

As such, we hope to encourage composting as an integral way to reduce food waste in Singapore, especially in light of the fast-filling Semakau landfill. We believe this could be an important answer to Singapore’s food waste problem which makes up 1/10 of the total generated waste in this island – a whopping 0.57 million tons per year! It remains one of the least recycled wastes, as compared to construction debris, used slag and metals. (Click here for the report by MEWR.)

CompostingInSingapore aims to bring creative, easy and effective recycling methods to Singapore. The first is essentially turning raw food scraps into great compost for your plants.

Think: fresh limes, pandan leaves and curry leaves right at your doorstep, or even fresh scented flowers in your room. Don’t grow plants? Well, now it is a good reason to! Our compost method begins simply in the kitchen as you prepare food for cooking. We will also teach you how to start and maintain your own compost bin – the Singaporean way.

Our second method (or project) is a daring, controversial, yet internationally long-practiced, well-established, safe, and effective way of recycling Humanure (human excrement) into nutrient-rich and healthy soil for crops. Unlike the first method, this applies very well to “difficult” wastes such as bones, meats, diary, cooked food and oils. In summary, anything organic that has its origins from the soil can be recycled right back into soil with this method!

Although recycling using Humanure applies more on a bigger-scale level (e.g. schools and camps), we believe this is a highly potential, exciting and eye-opening solution nevertheless. With this, we can say a definite goodbye to environmentally harmful and highly expensive incineration plants and landfills. We’re not kidding!

Surprised, shocked, or interested to know more?

Bookmark this blog for we will be updating it often. We welcome all comments and queries too!

About both of us:

That's us!

Michelle Sarah - graduated in 2008 with an honours degree in Communications and New Media (CNM) with a minor in Technopreneurship, National University of Singapore. Prior work experience in public relations, marketing, service and events. A person keen on details, colours, sounds and branding. Enjoys nature walks and breezes.

Joseph Solomon - graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and New Media (CNM), National University of Singapore. Prior work experience in sales and marketing. Quick-minded, enjoys entrepreneurship as a way of life. Loves tinkering with computers, technology and cloud computing. Grew up in a family which saved and re-used almost everything. Has a personal fancy for recycled brown paper bags.

What’s common about us? We’re both self-employed since Kainosis™ started in 2008, passionate about startups, enjoy taking risks and thinking out of the box. And yes, we only do things for real reason and purpose – that’s important for anything to take meaningful form and last!

We had our very first composting-related school project in 2008, where we came up with a home composting system for Singaporeans. It was carefully tailored to local food preparation habits in the kitchen, so that unwanted food scraps could be collected and composted with ease. However, it was an expensive system, as users still had to invest in a self-automated home composter. Since this was not practical for most Singaporeans who are not yet motivated to compost, we revised the entire system and created a homemade compost bin for under $20.

Today, we call it the sKrapper™ Composting System. Do look out for details coming up soon on this page.

Indeed, over extensive research and our current experience on composting, it came to light on how easy, useful and cost-saving composting could be. We hope that this blog and Project Kainosis™ will help promote food waste recycling in Singapore, and play a significant contributive role in curbing the urgent Semakau landfill problem.

If you like what we’re doing here, do support us on Facebook! Help us bring green awareness to fellow Singaporeans, and encourage them to recycle at home too.

Feel free to leave any comment, query, ideas or feedback on this site. You may also contact us directly at info@kainosis.com

Thank you for going green!