You are on the right track with straw or paper. Cardboard (paper towel and toilet paper rolls, corrugated, etc.) work well. Save some of those fall leaves in bags or a chicken wire bin and layer them with food waste throughout the year. Shredded yard waste, wood chips, sawdust all work too.

Grass clippings are high in N and although they make good compost, they too need browns added just like kitchen scraps. But even if you don't compost the grass clippings, the lawn crew should be returning those to the lawn using a mulching mower, or just left them fly out the chute. That sandy soil needs all the help it can get, and bagging and hauling off the clippings is like strip mining your nutrients off. It will be less work for them anyway if they don't have to bag.

Good luck and keep us posted on your progress.

Thanks for your comments. I agree about the grass clippings but this is a detached condominium community and changing such things isn't straightforward; but I'll try.

The Carbon to Nitrogen (C:N) ratio of the food scraps is about 20:1 and the optimal ratio for composting is about 30:1 so some source of something with a higher C:N ratio is needed. Many of those commercial lawn mowers pick up the grass clippings so they can compost them, knowing that those clippings are valuable sources of nutrients. Many of those companies also apply "fertilizer" to the lawns they mow, so they get paid for stealing the nutrients from the lawn and applying a source of nutrients that is less than what they remove.

While paper products are high Carbon materials they have no nutrients, other than the
carbon, to contribute.

kimmq is kimmsr

Yes, I do notice they shovel them into a truck and take them away. And, yes; they do fertilize the lawns.

Nevertheless, I'm assuming from your comments I need to add a whole lot more carbon to the pile. Thanks,

Tom

Paper isn't totally useless, mineral-wise. With all the coatings, it may have as much as 30% ash content. Wood ash is mostly calcium carbonate, but there is a little bit of P and K, plus trace amounts of other minerals that were in the wood to begin with. The coatings are usually stuff like clay, talc, etc. and will have their own mineral content. Having said all that, I don't compost paper and probably wouldn't try to depend on it for much nutrition, but if it's what you have, it sure fulfills the brown role in the compost pretty effectively. The garden trimmings, food scraps, leaves and grass clippings will have a more diverse content so it all comes out OK in the end.

That sounds like a very interesting way to go. Sounds like it's worth a try, thanks for the comment.

Tom C