Eco-Stock: Upcycling waste food

In my post when recycling goes wrong, I suggested that recycling is not always best, but it is very difficult to assess when it is not. To try to navigate through this, I suggested we need to be especially careful around food and systems that are hugely complex and perhaps unknowable in the full scale of potential interactions.

As it happened, I was in touch with somebody in New Zealand at about the same time as I wrote this, and she pointed out a food waste recycler in New Zealand called Eco-Stock (thanks Leny). I don't know if Leny was in touch with me because of my post or whether it was just synchronicity at play, but Eco-Stock is a very interesting company.

In essence, the business takes surplus food products and reprocesses it into stock feed for cows, calves, poultry and pigs. The food products that Eco-Stock deals with are:

• Production food waste
• Packaged goods
• Liquid/syrup wastes
• Chilled/frozen goods

These products would ordinarily go to landfill, but instead go through a stock food plant in South Auckland.

This is no different to what was (and is) always done on small farms. Animals get scraps so that they don't go to waste. Eco-Stock takes the concept to an industrial scale, but doesn't change the concept. So, in a sense, it doesn't mess with my poorly definable "natural order of things" test.

I think Eco-Stock is brilliant, and love the fact that they fuse waste management service delivery (they provide skip and hooklift bins to collect the waste) with a manufacturing mindset.

I also love the vision:

Be the catalyst that partners with industry and its communities to bring science and technology to waste goods, resulting in sustainably upcycling these into tradable commodities, to feed the growth of New Zealand