In terms of buckets? 1/4 bucket? 1/10 bucket?
Clearly it’s going to matter what you are composting, but if you had to make a general estimate…what would it be?
You might be able to turn up a site that lists it… but i’d say under 1/4. the scraps would have a lot of moisture, and they really break down to next to nothing.
You’d need to be adding them to your compost mix which would have the ‘brown’ component of leaves, cardboard. etc. to break down efficiently, so that would bulk up the result.
We compost about a bucket a week into an old style plastic rubbish bin, theres almost no limit to how many buckets we put in there, its more the other leaves and brown material that is the issue.
Thanks for replying. And just to clarify where I’m going w/ this, the idea is to combine the compostables of myself and a number of others and to determine how much finished product one is entitled to by how many buckets of scraps one contributed.
Well, the most straightforward way is to keep track of how many buckets each person contributes, observe how much total compost you end up with, and then allocate the individual share of the whole in proportion to the individual contribution.
Or are you planning to be tapping the compost pile on a continuous basis so you need a standard input-to-output ratio?
Yeah, tapping it on more of a continuous basis. Don’t need an exact figure (and again, it is sure to vary w/ materials), but wouldn’t want to assume 1/2 bucket when it is actually 1/50th or vice versa.
Here is a chapter of a book (in pdf) which has some tables about compost compaction percentage of different materials over time. Some seem to go to 50% at 75 days. I’m not interested enough to actually read it (and the quality is not that good on my computer, at least) but it is some data.
I thought you were going have your bodies composted, and wondered how your survivors would devy it up.
Hell, it’s the Straight Dope.