Bokashi Composting: Everything You Want to Know
The easy, odour-free home food waste recycling solution for every kitchen.
What Is Bokashi Composting?
Bokashi uses effective micro-organisms (EM) to ferment all your food waste in a sealed bin — including meat, dairy, cooked leftovers and bones. Rather than rotting, the waste is preserved and transformed into a powerful compost activator, locking in nutrients and flooding the material with billions of beneficial microbes.
Unlike traditional composting, a bokashi bin accepts all food waste with no exceptions, produces no foul odours and fits neatly under your kitchen counter. Once fermented, your home food waste becomes a potent ingredient for food waste composting — whether you're enriching your own garden, contributing to a community project or supplying an industrial composting site.
How Bokashi Is Used
Once food waste has been fermented with bokashi, the final product can be used to enrich soil in different spaces. It all depends on your goals and situation.
Your Own
Garden
Bury your fermented bokashi waste directly in your garden beds, add it to your compost heap or feed it to your worm farm. Within weeks, soil microbes break it down — enriching your soil with nutrients and beneficial microbes.
Community
Gardens
No garden? No problem. Donate your fermented bokashi bin to a local community garden like the Somerset West Village Garden, where it is transformed into rich compost used to grow organic vegetables for the community.
Industrial Composting
Commercial kitchens and larger operations can have their fermented bokashi waste collected and taken to industrial composting sites — where it acts as a powerful activator, dramatically speeding up large-scale composting and diverting waste.
Bokashi Composting Benefits for Your Kitchen
No flies, no maggots, no odours. Your bokashi bin keeps food waste sealed and hygienic — indoors, for up to 6 months. Instead of rotting in a bin bag, your home food waste is preserved, and your municipality bin goes out just once a month or less.
Bokashi Benefits for Your Environment
Bokashi reduces harmful methane emissions, rebuilds depleted soil and promotes earthworms. In the Western Cape, 21 of 24 landfills are critically or already full. Every bokashi bin diverted from landfill is a small act with a very big impact.
How Does Bokashi Work?
Step 1: Fermentation
Layer your food waste into a sealed bokashi bin and sprinkle Bokashi powder over each addition. The anaerobic environment triggers the effective microorganisms (EM) to ferment rather than decompose — locking in nutrients, suppressing bad bacteria, and preserving every scrap of food value.
How To Use Bokashi Powder
1
Start With Bokashi
Sprinkle bokashi powder on the bottom of your bin before adding any food waste.
2
Add Food Scraps
Collect all your food scraps in a small kitchen caddy throughout the day.
3
Fill Your Bokashi Bin
Empty the food scraps from your small caddy into the bokashi bin each time it fills up.
4
Layer With Bokashi
Sprinkle two handfuls of bokashi powder over each layer of food waste.
5
Seal Tightly
Close the lid and clamp it shut firmly after every use to keep air out.
6
Mark & Ferment
Write the date on the lid when full and leave to ferment for two weeks.