Here’s your garden variety compost

Olga Kachook is a sustainable expert at World Centric for a Better World, an environmental organization. If you’d like to create your own compost for your garden, she offers these tips:

• Newspaper can go into your compost and will add carbon to your bin. To be sure it breaks down quickly, shred it first.
• Cardboard pizza boxes are too greasy and contaminated with too much food residue to be recycled. Food is one of the worst contaminants in the paper recycling processes. 
• Tea bags and coffee filters can both be composted; however, be sure to remove the staple from the tea bag first.
• Food coffee stirrers are fine. Wood is compostable and a good carbon-rich addition to your compost pile.
• Wine cork is a natural material and thus can be returned to the earth through composting.