You Don’t Have to Be Good at Composting

Designing Systems for Imperfect Participation

Composting is often framed as a skill.

Something you either do well or badly. Something you learn, master, and get “right”.

People worry about doing it properly.

About smells.

About pests.

About contamination.

About being bad at composting.

This framing quietly excludes most people.

Because real life is messy. Kitchens are busy. Energy fluctuates. Attention comes and goes. And systems that only work when people perform perfectly tend to fail at scale.

If composting is going to matter not as a niche practice, but as everyday infrastructure, it has to be designed for imperfect participation.

Composting Isn’t a Test

Most composting advice is written as instruction:

Do this.

Avoid that.

Balance your ratios.

Turn at the right time.

This makes composting feel like a checklist you can fail.

But composting is not a moral exam.

It’s a biological process.

Food waste breaks down because bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates do the work, not because humans follow rules flawlessly.

As we explored in Composting Is Participation, Not Waste Disposal, composting works best when it’s understood as involvement in a living system, not a performance of technical correctness.

Biology doesn’t require perfection.

It responds to conditions.

Where Most Systems Break

Many compost systems are designed around ideal behaviour.

They assume:

• consistent attention

• correct inputs every time

• stable routines

• confidence and prior knowledge

But most people don’t live like that.

People forget.

People get tired.

People miss a week.

People overfill the bin.

When systems can’t absorb that variation, participation drops.

This is why so many people try composting and then stop, not because they don’t care, but because the system doesn’t meet them where they are.

We see this clearly in urban contexts, where space is limited and food waste management is already stressful. As explored in Why Your Bin Stinks, many problems blamed on individuals are actually design failures.

Designing for Imperfection

At Generation Soil, we design compost systems around the assumption that people will be imperfect.

That means:

• irregular participation

• mixed inputs

• learning as you go

• mistakes being normal

Bokashi fermentation, for example, stabilises food waste early. That makes the system more forgiving, of timing, of quantities, of human inconsistency. You don’t have to be “good” at composting to take part.

Community composting adds another layer of resilience. When composting is shared, no single person has to get everything right. Responsibility is distributed. Knowledge circulates.

As explored in What People Learn by Composting Together, confidence grows through participation, not instruction.

Why Participation Matters More Than Precision

When systems prioritise precision, they limit scale.

When systems prioritise participation, they grow.

A household that composts imperfectly for years contributes more to soil regeneration than one that composts perfectly for three months and gives up.

Consistency matters more than correctness.

This is why community-scale composting can feel slower, but is often more durable. As discussed in Why Living Systems Break When We Rush Them, speed and control tend to undermine resilience in living systems.

Compost made slowly, with variation, handled by many hands, often supports richer biology than compost forced into narrow parameters.

Compost as a Shared Responsibility

One of the quiet shifts that happens in well-designed systems is a change in how responsibility feels.

Instead of:

“If I mess this up, I’m failing.”

It becomes:

“The system can hold this.”

When composting is visible, local, and relational, as explored in A Week Inside a Community Compost System, people stop worrying about getting it right and start paying attention.

Smell becomes information.

Texture becomes feedback.

Time becomes an ally.

This is where learning actually happens.

Lowering the Barrier Changes Everything

If composting is only accessible to people with:

• gardens

• time

• confidence

• technical knowledge

…it will always remain marginal.

Designing for imperfect participation means lowering the barrier to entry:

• making systems smell-safe

• reducing the consequences of mistakes

• offering shared infrastructure

• supporting learning without judgement

This is how composting becomes normal rather than exceptional.

It’s also how composting becomes infrastructure, as explored in Gardens Are Infrastructure, Not a Hobby, rather than a personal virtue project.

You’re Allowed to Be Bad at Composting

You don’t need to be tidy.

You don’t need to be consistent.

You don’t need to know what you’re doing yet.

You just need a system that expects you to be human.

Composting that relies on perfection will always exclude most people.

Composting designed for participation can scale quietly, steadily, and relationally.

That’s the difference between compost as a lifestyle choice and compost as a public good.

Taking Part Is Enough

You don’t have to be “good” at composting.

You don’t have to get it right every time.

You don’t have to carry the system on your own.

You just have to take part imperfectly, inconsistently, and over time.

That’s how soil is rebuilt.

That’s how systems last.

That’s how regeneration actually happens.