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Hot composting make you sick?
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Posted by
BringItHard none (
My Page) on
Sun, Oct 23, 11 at 1:34
| Can hot composting make you sick? I have 2 worm farms and I collected 10lbs of grass clippings throw the clippings in an 18 gallon bin put the bin in my spare room next to the worm farm thinking i have lots of food for them now. over the next 3 days I became really really sick barfing the whole bit and had no idea why. 2 days after that I came home and was like damn it smells in here and I realized that it was the grass container! i took it out on my patio. and over the next week i got better and it was an after thought. I went to get some food for the worms, i opened the container with the grass clippings and noticed that the pile was really hot so i started to turn it with my hand held rake and it smelled like bad olives and worst part my hands stunk for hours not even gas would take to smell away!! any ways then next week I needed to feed the worms and i opened that container this time with gloved and a mask but I feel like im getting sick again and i was wondering if it had to do with that damn bin with 9lb of month old yard clippings? |
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: Hot composting make you sick?
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| Grass clippings, with a C:N ratio of about 19:1 will heat up and do produce large amounts of gasses that can make someone ill. Keeping them inside in a closed room will seriously aggravate this. |
RE: Hot composting make you sick?
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| Have you looked elsewhere for the cause? Could it have been food poisoning? -Complaints about compost poisoning must be quite rare in comparison. |
Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/food-poisoning/DS00981/DSECTION=sympt
oms
RE: Hot composting make you sick?
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| I'm not sure why you're keeping compostables inside, or even composting inside. What are you making compost for? I think a pile outside, in a bin or right on the ground where you can add all of your ingredients without trying to store them first would be much better. With exposure to air, the odor would go away, especially if you mix in a few hand fulls of dry leaves. Throw the worms in, too, they'll be right at home. Decomposition is much better outside, IMO. Like kim said, the grass clippings are decomposting, whether you are ready for them to or not. It seems like you have a lot of odor brewing that's not necessary. On another side, there's the question of why not just feed the worms your kitchen scraps? Peel an apple, feed the peel to the worms, nothing sitting around getting stinky. Potato peels, onion skins, bell pepper stems, carrot tops, coffee grounds, u know, that kind of stuff. Is that something that might work for you? |
RE: Hot composting
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| Did I really? Yes, I did say decomposting. Temporary Archie Bunkerism? |
RE: Hot composting make you sick?
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| Well, my job consists of a different king of composting.... Waste water! We "compost" solids to break them down and any time that I have to spend a lot of time around our digesters, I get sick. There may be some extra pathogens involved, but the processes is kinda similar and more sterile. |
RE: Hot composting make you sick?
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| Look up Phisteria algae. There are apparently reliable reports of people becoming sick by standing on a low bridge above an algal bloom in a polluted river in NC. It seems to give off volatile toxins, as I am told do a number of other aquatic microbes. A few years back some geologists speculated that a few of the major extinctions in ancient pre-dinosaur times may have related to the huge amount of cyanobacterial activity then making certain types of limestone. |
RE: Hot composting make you sick?_
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| Pfiesteria. I misspelled it above. |
RE: Hot composting make you sick?
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| That's very interesting, but out of all the potential things coming off a pile of grass, why would a particular algae (which normally grow in aquatic environments) be the culprit? I'm thinking mold spores myself, or ammonia and other nitrogen-containing gases. |
RE: Hot composting make you sick?
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| I merely mentioned it as an example of a remote-acting microbial-origin toxin. I certainly don't suggest that it specifically is in compost piles. |
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