Compost your kitchen scraps at the 241 Bondi Road Community Garden
Words by Kit
A number of unit-dwellers in Bondi have asked where they can put their kitchen scraps, not having access to a compost bin in their own building complex.
At the front of 241 Bondi Rd, Transition Bondi’s three compost bins are there for any thoughtful composter to use.
In fact we’ve got a nice little collaborative arrangement with the local Thai restaurant Thai Fire-Fry. They give us several boxes of carrot peelings and cabbage ends a week, that we gladly pour into our compost bins to create ‘black gold’ for our community garden at the back. It’s a win-win, and there should be more of it, as it reduces the cost of garbage collection for food businesses.
For individual composters, in a flat, there is also the Bokashi bucket method of recycling food scraps, using a commercial enzyme that breaks down the food in a sealed container (good for the nose), over a number of weeks, until it’s ready to be incorporated into a well-cooking compost bin. The benefit of Bokashi is that one doesn’t need to empty the scraps as often.
The big picture of composting of course is the need to reduce the amount of organic waste going into landfill. According to the EPA (Environmental Protection Authority) about 35% of waste found in our red garbage bins is food. Hand in hand with home composting is the need for all of us to reduce edible food waste.
Transition Bondi’s April Film & Feast event held a workshop with a South Sydney Resource Recovery Educator, who showed an informative short film (7 min) on reducing food waste in your kitchen. You can watch it at tinyurl.com/kitchensave1000.
At the landfill sites, food that is buried without access to air (oxygen), decomposes ‘anaerobically’ i.e. without air, and in the process creates Methane gas which is four times as potent as Carbon as a Greenhouse gas. This contributes to climate change.
So composting is not only a very fun thing to do (we all love the worms), but your civic duty!! Equal weight of green (moist) and brown (dry) material is how you do it. Stir it every week with the giant cork-screw that comes with them.* Look up more detail online.
And please use our community composting bins – and let us know. We’d like to know how much interest there is.
I heard of another community garden group setting up a bicycle pick-up of restaurant scraps several times a week. Nice work, and requires a team of keen people. Are you such a person?
Kit
* compostrevolution.com.au enables you to get a much discounted compost bin or worm farm from council, after you take a short survey
