Farming the rubbish bin

According to a report recently released by the UK Institution of Mechanical Engineers, up to 50% of the world's harvest is wasted. That corresponds to 1.2-2 billion tonnes of food every year, and is extraordinary when there are 870 million undernourished people in the world (ie consuming less than 2100 calories per day). Not to mention the immense waste of land, energy and water. It is no overstatement that people starve in a planet of extraordinary abundance.

Food waste: an immense challenge that can be overcome.

Spoiled for a lack of markets, not up to quality standards or whatever, there is an immense amount of waste in our food system. And so, to me, the problem of feeding the global population is less a matter of insufficient land or yield, and more a matter of distribution and waste.

To take a leaf from Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountains Institute who refers to the immense opportunity for oil independence through "drilling under Detroit" (ie gaining large quantities of oil by improving fuel efficiency of motor vehicles), there is an equally immense opportunity for "Farming the rubbish bin".

Even more usefully, there are many role models that can be referred to in order to develop up the patchwork that will eventually form a solution to the problem.

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

Composters - the men and women behind the vision

Most of the garbage we produce in our home has high levels of food, paper and other biodegradable waste, "organics" in the trade. In a landfill, these organics lead to methane, a strong greenhouse gas. Organics also lead to the stench and water pollution associated with landfill.

As a result, whenever you look at dealing with garbage, organics is a prominent target. Most obvious is to stop the waste in the first place. Reduce wastage of food and you are a long way in front. According to the Australia Institute, $5.2m of food is wasted in Australia each year, more than is spent annually on digital equipment.

You can do better at landfill, capturing the methane, but this is ultimately a losing bet. Most of the gas is gone before you can capture it. You can incinerate it, but to get energy out of the organics you have to consume energy drying it out.

Best is to convert the organics to compost, and take the organics back to the land where it can grow more crops. It seems obvious but is far from settled. There is the question of contamination of the finished compost - heavy metals, plastics and glass being high on the list of concerns. There is the question of technology - the piece of plant to convert the waste into compost, how effective it is, how expensive. And, finally, there is the question of economics. Compost is classically low value, but its low density makes costs high.

Enter the composters. These are the people who underpin the entire edifice of sustainable waste management. They take a product from a waste processing plant, generally of low value, and add value such that it can be sold on to end users. The value is added through blending to create a product targeted for particular soil deficiencies, distribution, agricultural trials and even packaging. Some of the cleverest work is in pelletising compost so that it can be direct drilled into broadacre crops with seeding machines.

Without the composters, the end product after composting garbage would still be garbage. It would be a product looking for somebody naive enough to accept it. With composters, the end product is high value and in demand. Crops demonstrate this.

Perth is blessed with three excellent composters: Nutrarich, Richgro and Custom Composts. Each is driven by strong personalities who believe in what they do, and do what they believe. They don't see themselves as participating in the waste industry. They are in agriculture or horticulture. They are the most valuable piece of the puzzle. 

Compost worked into horticultural soils, image from Biogro

I suspect these traits are shared by composters around the world. They are driven, passionate and highly articulate people linking two ends of the continuum, ends that always were connected until relatively recently. Here's to the composters - the men and women behind the vision.