DESIGNING A COMPACT INDOOR COMPOSTER FOR MALAYSIAN KITCHEN WASTE COMPOSTING

Abstract

Composting is a process in which organic substances are reduced from large volumes of rapidly decomposable materials to small volumes of materials that continue to decompose slowly in controlled conditions to produce a soil conditioner. Composting is not widely practice due to certain limitations such as the waste is too high in moisture content and hard to segregate. High humidity climate making the waste hard to preserved. The present of odour and vector problem, reduce the interest in trying to apply composting. A compact indoor composter was build to performed composting for households waste generated from the kitchen that is able to eliminate vector and odour issues. Waste collection was performed schedually for 8 weeks to obtain the data on waste generation percapita for composter size estimations. A fourteen days two trail composting was performed to determine the efficiency of the composter using unmodified waste. The composting was unable to pass through thermophilic regions for pathogenic removal with the average temperature of 35°C. The sample was determined are very high in moisture which pose problems to the composting where the excess moisture leach out from compost carry along macro nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium out from the compost up to 50 percent from the initial concentrations. Fortunately, the compost was able to reduce the mass of the waste efficiently with the range of 70 to 85 percent by mass. Compost products generated from the composter are rich in potassium, which is suitable usage for plants with seeds and flowers.