Waste & Recycling News reporter Kerri Jansen has been blogging about her experience with Bokashi composting, a new method of composting developed in Japan and gaining popularity in the U.S. This is Part 6 of her story.

It’s been a week since I sealed my bokashi compost bin. I can’t see what’s going on inside, but I assume the food scraps are happily fermenting away.

I’ve gotten used to saving food scraps; it feels strange, now, to throw them away or put them down my in-sink disposer. Strange and wasteful. Apparently it’s common for bokashi bucketeers to have two bins and rotate them, filling one while the other ferments and then switching. If I were to continue bokashi composting, I would probably go with that option.

The only problem is that double the bins would produce double the compost. Living in a small urban apartment, it was difficult to find a home for even the five gallons in my bucket (my roommate agreed to take the compost away and bury it in her garden). Although bokashi composting is marketed as an easy method of in-home composting, my friend pointed out that it may not be the most practical for someone in my situation. For someone with a garden close-by or property on which to use the compost, however, bokashi composting does provide a relatively simple and mess-free way to produce compost.

But bokashi composting isn’t limited to small-scale, in-home operations like mine. A handful of U.S. restaurants are composting their food waste - much more than five gallons - using principles of bokashi, the Associated Press reported.

This summer, a country club in Massachusetts was planning to use their compost on an herb and seasonings garden, nourishing the next generation of growth. The club’s executive chef told the AP he was pleased with how the process was working so far; the compost had remained untouched by pests and produced no foul odors.

That restaurant planned to use bokashi composting to tackle four tons of food waste per year. That puts only the tiniest dent in the more than 30 million tons of food waste the U.S. generates every year.

There are some logistics that have to be worked out before bokashi composting would be practical on a nationwide scale. Researchers are still trying to better understand exactly why and how bokashi composting works, and how it can be best implemented. Maybe with more research and some creative thinking, bokashi composting could see widespread adoption.

I'm going to let my own small bin ferment for another week before opening it. I hope my small operation will be as successful as that Massachusetts country club's bokashi project. Five gallons isn't much, but if it turns out smelly, rotten and sloppy, it might as well be a full four tons.

w w w . w a s t e r e c y c l i n g n e w s . c o m

copyright 2012 by Crain Communications Inc. All rights reserved.