I’ve had a food waste system at home for the past 20 years. I don’t call it composting because my focus isn’t about making a beautiful fertilising system for a beautiful permaculture garden, it’s just about reducing what I’m sending to landfill and having a system that’s not too smelly and doesn’t take up too much room or require a lot of time and energy from me. My system has mostly worked but got much better after I did my volunteer work with Food Know How, collecting cafe food waste and taking it to Collingwood Children’s Farm for processing into real compost.
The biggest problem faced by the Food Know How project, was finding enough carbon to help the decomposition into fluffy, pleasant compost, rather than anaerobic, smelly slime. Carbon seems to be the factor in food waste systems that gets left out.
I’ve started putting all of the food contaminated paper into my food waste bin – butter wrappers (I only buy butter that allows me to compost the wrapper), flour bags, brown paper bags that I buy bread and mushrooms in, used tissues etc. That’s still not enough to make happy compost, so I’ve recently put a paper shredder near the food waste bin, and half fill the bucket with shredded paper each time it’s emptied.
I’m a member of the Urban Coup and we’re currently involved in the collaborative design process for the co-housing development in Nightingale Village. I’m finally able to put my interest in food waste systems in apartment buildings into practise!
A few weeks ago, I met up with a several of the Urban Coupers including Bron who is a resident at The Commons. Bron has an interest in permaculture and has been one of the residents looking after their worm farms. It was useful to collect the experiences that people have had with food waste and look at a building that already has a communal food waste system, to see what works, what doesn’t and what our ideal system would look like.
The Commons has 24 households and started with 4 worm farms, 8no comingled recycling bins, and 8no landfill bins. They now have 6 worm farms, 6no recycling bins and 4no landfill bins. Bron felt they needed more worm farms, but when we went and took a look at them only one was working effectively, with a healthy worm population and only aerobic breakdown. The worm farms are Hungry Bins. Until recently, they were also composting food scraps that can’t go into the worm farms, but that’s not currently available. The refuse room has a blackboard, plenty of signage and a cleaners sink. The residents supply their own containers to carry waste, recycling and food scraps and to the refuse room.
Based on The Commons, and our experiences, this is what our ideal waste system (for 30 households) looks like;
- 5 landfill bins
- 8 recycling bins – based on the “recycling crisis”, we talked about using these bins to separate our recycling more thoroughly than the current co-mingled systems.
- 6 organic waste bins (similar size to standard 240L bins) – either hungry bins or aerobins and maybe a mix of both.
- Shredder for paper and maybe cardboard. This will be added to the food waste
- Grinder to reduce size of organic waste (wishlist item)
- Bin washing area
- Sink for residents to wash personal food scrap bins (same tap as bin wash?)
I’ve also reviewed many waste reports, including those for apartments and it feels like waste consultants have no idea about how to deal with food waste. They either leave out any mention of options for food waste, or they design systems that are too small and have insufficient maintenance.
OTOH, most people who aren’t me are pretty crap at getting these systems to work well. Here’s a study of a bunch of people in an apartment building and some of the issues the food waste system had to deal with.
Anyway, here are the things I think make a food waste system accessible for people;
- The inside container needs to match the lifestyle of the people using it – how often it gets emptied, how clean it needs to be, what food waste the household creates.
- Some people won’t like cleaning the container, and they will need some sort of bag system to line the container. “Compostable” plastic bags don’t compost and shouldn’t be used – a paper liner would be better for these people.
- Organic waste disposal in a compost or worm farm system doesn’t mean just food waste. Paper and cardboard are an important part of a successful system and can include paper food packaging, tissues, paper towels (if you use them) and shredded paper. Side note – offices could be including paper towels from bathrooms in their organic waste streams.
- It needs to be easy to shred paper, so maybe shredders should be included in apartment waste rooms?
- Waste rooms should also include facilities to wash the kitchen bucket.
- Aerobins don’t need turning and can accept most food waste
- Hungry bins use worms to process food waste and need careful and educated use.