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Last year, after a busy service, I happened to glance into the bin after cleaning down the kitchen and noticed the amount of organic waste in it. It prompted me to crunch some numbers. Here are the results.
Imagine that you are about to sit down to a plate of beautiful fresh produce. l think that it would take about 350g of it to fill you up (after all you are healthy eaters). At Danks Street Depot and throughout the art complex, we went through about 3 wheelie bins of green waste each day, which translates to about 9 tonnes of organic waste and 25,714 plates of food each year! Over the 7 years we’d been in the Danks Street complex, that’s a massive 180,000 plates or 63 tonnes of waste!
I had to start thinking about ways to harness this and the answer came out of a meeting with Michael Mobbs of Aerobin composts a quick drive to Chippendale and a walk down Myrtle Street to see the Aerobins in action. Myrtle street has one of the best arrays of edible plants I have seen growing on the verge and a successful community composting system in place which feeds the roadside community garden.
What’s involved? Its a really simple process, but it takes a little discipline because you need to make sure that the compost doesn’t get too wet or too dry, and is very easy - all of our staff have embraced (not literally) the compost bin. Using a mixture of our restaurant’s and the art complex’s green waste (basically, anything that comes from the ground including onion skin, coffee grounds, citrus but no meat or dairy), scrunched up newspaper, dockets, paper napkins and cardboard along with a few handfuls of hay to control moisture, we’ve managed to harvest enough soil to grow herbs, interesting plants such as stevia, lemon and lime verbena, lemon grass, lilly pilly and tomatoes. Not enough to support the restaurant which at this stage is not th epoint (one day definitely) as I do have a vision for Danks St Waterloo to be surrounded by life and greenery that can be enjoyed by anyone in the local community.
What I am hoping to demonstrate is that it is not just important to take responsibility for the impact YOU make on the environmetn, but also that it is easy and practicle, and given another growing season, will be beautiful.
We will overtime, be updating our composting story, but if you are interested in knowing more, please feel free to drop us a line, also, if you are in the Danks St Waterloo area and would like to know more about the community aspects of our project please feel free to contact us.
Here is an image gallery which we will update from time to time.
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