New food scrap collection started!
08 October 2023
In a collaboration with Papatoetoe Food Hub and local New World Papatoetoe, on the 8th of October we kicked off our new food scrap collection. 3 young girls showed interest in this new initiative after attending one of our Ōtara-Papatoetoe Eco-neighbourhoods events: Vegetarian cooking - which was held at the Food hub. Thanks to Raju from the Food Hub for connecting with New World to make this happen.
Through this relationship, Max and the fruit and vege department at New World Pap agreed to save 1 of their food scrap wheelie bins for us to pick up and compost once weekly. Acknowledging the astronomical “waste” problem but also the need to regenerate our soils and community.
We had a safe route planned from New World to the Food hub for the girls, a preparation station built consisting of a prep bench to chop up the scraps, small buckets for easy lifting with an old school scale for weighing.
On our very first collection, we all made our way over to New World by foot to wheel the bin over. To our surprise, they saved us 2 bins. It was a nice short walk back and in the bins we were greeted by an abundance of lettuce and cabbage leaves and the odd piece of taro.
We noticed that 95% of the food scraps were absolutely still good for consumption but for some reason people did not like the outer leaves of cabbages and lettuce.
The girls found it very satisfying ripping up the leaves... up to a point... After tearing up the 2 bins worth of leaves by hand, (Ana forgot to grab the kitchen code for knives..whoops), we weighed the scraps along with some browns/carbon to support the magic of hot compost. Weighing up our additions and what we’d rescued would help us track our progress and see just how much ‘waste’ would’ve gone to landfill if we did not intervene.
After filling up the compost bay lasagne style, we tallied up our numbers and concluded that 40.9kgs of scraps and browns was returned to the whenua in just under 2 hours. 40.9kgs of “waste” saved from going to landfill and gone back into the whenua to create amazing nutrient rich compost that more food could grow from. An awesome, huge effort from the girls, Naz and Ayla. Happy that they really enjoyed this first session.
- Ana Ung