Thinking about your food waste

 

Recently I was discussing the topic of food waste with a nice fellow from ‘Food Waste Recyclers’ and I was presented with two horrifying figures that have been heavily on my mind since. Australian’s recycle less than 10% of food waste each year. This means that over 3 million tonnes of food waste is making its way direct into landfill. 3 million! Does this amaze you? It surely does me.

 

Now, you may or may not know that unlike glass and plastic, organic waste will decompose once it's put in the ground – creating a big problem in landfills. As the buried food breaks down in these oxygen-free environments, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas which has up to 25 times the carbon impact of carbon dioxide on the environment.

 

This is absolutely astounding given that this issue is one so easily avoided. Instead of sending this food waste to landfill where it decomposes and creates methane, a potent greenhouse gas, it can easily be turned into valuable compost which can re-enrich our soils.

 

I have a compost bin at home, sitting tucked away nicely in my backyard. I use it for all my food waste and I get lovely compost in return.  If you don’t have a yard or somewhere appropriate to store a traditional compost bin, there are other good alternatives. Start a worm farm or take a look at a Bokashi Bin. An amazing bonus of the Bokashi Bin is that you can also discard any fish, meat, bones and dairy as well as vegetable matter. I am interested to hear how others recycle their food waste and what benefits they see from this.

Comments

[Christine Pyman]

I must confess that my compost making is not the most successful and I have been meaning to try the bokashi method but have not started yet... But what I do with the majority of food scraps is to feed the chickens that I have in my back garden. I know that not everyone can or wants to keep chooks, but they are fabulous to have around!
The benefits are -
-the most amazingly coloured egg yolks you will ever see and taste - people have even thought that I use food colouring in my cooking!
- hormone and artificial additive free eggs
- eggs for you and to give away if you want
- no snails, slugs, or sour sobs ( chooks love sour sobs)
-hardly any food waste
- fun watching and getting to know the chook's personalities
- watching them chase the cats !!!
- knowing that at least some chooks are getting a happy healthy life.

[Matt]

You're right, we need to not only recycle and reuse waste, but also prevent it in the first place, and that's where composting plays its part. In our house, we've been using bokashi for about a year. We simply have two bowls in the kitchen, one for immediate composting into which we throw banana skins,apple cores, potato peelings etc, and one for bokashi composting into which we add plate scrapings, cooked food waste, bacon rind, etc. Then, at the end of the day the bokashi waste goes in the bokashi bin and the rest goes straight into the compost bin. There are two of us and it takes us about three weeks to fill a bokashi bin. The bokashi bin generates lots of bokashi juice which we use to give our plants a boost. When the bin's full and has been left to ferment for ten days or so, we throw it on the compost heap or bury it straight in the garden. If you're interested I've written about the process in more detail on the bokashi section of my site: www.leangreenhome.co.uk/bokashi/.