Council shredder on tour and compost with minimum methane

If you burn your garden waste it creates a lot of greenhouse gas and other pollution. If you shred it, you create a useful garden mulch. Shredding on a big scale is relatively fuel efficient.

Photo: Ruscombe view

The Council pay for a big shredder which is on tour around Stroud (dates and locations below). You just take along your pruning and clippings, then collect the mulch later. They do the shredding. You don't have to take prunings to collect mulch.
Methane and Leachate In Home Compost?

Home compost can produce a small amount of methane in the heap, especially if it is allowed to get soggy, but it does not release methane to the atmosphere as a small heap has a much higher surface/middle ratio compared to a huge landfill site. Micro-organisms active in outer layers oxidise methane to CO2. The outside 3" on the top and sides of a home heap are close enough to the air always to be "outside" - leaving perhaps 18" deep inside in a compost heap. Those same 3" on landfill are sitting on top of perhaps 20 metres depth of airless waste, so cannot oxidise the methane, which then escapes into the atmosphere (some is captured at landfill but by no means all of it can be caught).

Research indicates that more of the organic content of waste is converted to gases in anaerobic conditions than it is in an aerobic compost heap. The aerobic processes in a home compost heap tend to stabilise the structure of the rotted ingredients into so-called humic compounds - complex organic molecules which have gel-like properties & are very valuable for soil structure. During this process CO2, rather than methane, is also given off. Technical measurements have confirmed that methane is not given off by home compost.

Home compost heaps will only produce leachate if they are not covered & are then rained on very heavily - if a heap gets really wet it won't compost well & will be very heavy to move about. This would only be a problem if the leachate then ran directly into a watercourse. Otherwise leachate is simply absorbed by the soil & used by the active plants & animals living there.

Observation suggests that when food and vegetation rots airlessly it tends to produce more of a wet slop without structure. This suggests that proportionally more leachate is produced in landfill. Even so, leachate is a problem in landfill for 2 reasons which don't apply to home compost heaps:-
1] landfill isn't sheltered from rain, nor is it resting on the soil, because it may be near the water table, & as such huge quantities of leachate are concentrated in one place, leakage of runoff can produce a major pollution problem locally.
2] there are numerous potentially toxic items in landfill (eg batteries, household chemicals, illegally dumped chemical waste etc). Leachate is mildly acidic by nature (which is why you sometimes need to lime heavily mucked soil) - and therefore tends to react with all these other substances and in many cases will make them more soluble, thereby carrying them into the wider environment where they are obviously not wanted. (Thanks to Forest Friends of the Earth newsletter for this info).
Dates for shredder

These are the dates and rough locations. Phone Mike Exley on 01285 760519 for more detail:
26th Jan: Elm Road and Cashes Green 2nd Feb: Chalford Hill 23rd Feb Stratford Road 1st March Bussage 19th April Bussage 26th April Chalford 3rd May Chalford 10th May Slad Road 17th May Dudbridge