How Does This Impact your Life?

First off, some facts about compost composition:

The average urban compost pile is made of about 90 percent organic material and 10 percent mineral.

The nutrient breakdown depends HEAVILY on the types of materials that went into the compost in the first place. You could expect to see something like this:

Nutrient	Percent Concentration
Nitrogen	2.6
Carbon	27
Phosphorous	.9
Potassium	2.0
Sulfur	.5
Iron	.8
Zinc	.02
Copper	.006
Boron	.002
Manganese	.03

Plus or minus a handful of minerals.

These nutrients are essential to plant growth and have a delicate balance between the atmosphere, plants and the soil. In order to increase crop production, companies add excessive amounts of these nutrients to the soil and crops remove a lot of trace minerals in the process. Since the average American does not compost, these minerals and nutrients from leftover plant waste go to the dump where they interact with battery acid, toxic metals and other contaminants that should go nowhere near your food. Essentially, they are removed from the system.

Now assuming I am an average American household (which may or may not be a pretty big IF) when it comes to throwing away organic material:

In one year I would waste about 61 pounds of organic material.

In that same year, this class would waste about 1600 pounds of organic material.

That means everyone at UCDenver would waste about 17 million pounds of organic material.

And the state of Colorado would waste about 305 million pounds of organic material.

And compounded over many years, that is a large amount of essential plant and ecosystem nutrition that we are surrendering to landfills every year.

But what if I cannot, at all, have a compost heap?

There are still things you can do such as being aware of how much food you throw out. Taking smaller trips to the grocery store, buying what you know you would eat, freezing excess portions, being better about refrigeration and food preservation techniques etc.