We composted 1 TONNE!

29 February 2024

Meet the gang/our Southside whenua2whenua champions - Ayla, Alena and Naz! 🫶🏽 Since October 2023, they’ve dedicated their precious time and energy to divert food scraps from local New World Papatoetoe from going to landfill.

Each Thursday evening we meet up, one of the girls collects and walks the wheelie bin full of New World scraps over to the Food hub. We chop the scraps into small bits, weigh for data purposes and then return the bays. This usually takes us about an hour and a half from start to finish. In 4 short months their efforts have composted 1 whole tonne (1000kgs) worth of food scraps and carbon!! This is 1000kgs of food and carbon that is being turned into compost to grow food and regenerate soils rather than creating greenhouse gases, rotting and leaching into waterways via landfill and just between us 4 girls, the kilos saved is continuing to rise!

NZ Corrections helped with the heavy work of turning the first compost bay which we filled by the end of December 2023. After 3 months of letting that bay rest, we were stoked to have some beautiful rich compost ready for harvest. We filled up half an old potting mix bag for Naz’s mum who has a garden of her own and a strong love of plant keeping.

We celebrated these milestones by having a delicious dinner hosted by Naz’s mum and enjoyed yummy banana muffins made by Ana. It was such a treat to get a tour around Naz’s mums’ garden and see all her plants which our locally made compost was going to help nourish. I can already foresee future visits to Naz’s place, exchanging cuttings with her mum.

We are so proud of our amaaazing girls out here doing the do, putting their hands together to make this possible. And even more proud that our older 2 have started University this year and our youngest is on the way to Japan with Youth Summit!! Incredible. Our hope is to support them in all ways we can in order to give back just as they give their time and efforts to their local community.

- Ana Ung