Waste not want not

“Nature is much cleverer than we are – infinitely complex but producing no waste; everything in a natural food web is used, recycled and re-used at one point or another.” Dr David Batton - CSIRO

As our government battles the ever growing issue of waste, it seems we have a long way to go before we stop using landfill and start returning what we borrowed back to Nature.

Australia is the second highest producer of waste per capita (second only to the US). Each year we spend about $4 billion dollars just to manage the 38 million tonnes of waste we produce. Astoundingly, 60% of this waste is food and organic materials! This figure is increasing and it’s not just down to population growth. We live in a throwaway society where even organic foods are wrapped in non-recyclable plastic packaging. As Australians, we throw away an astounding $5 billion worth of food each year. Most of this ends up in landfill where it decomposes, emitting greenhouse gases and losing whatever nutrients were stored in the food.

Nature's Cycle

Imagine if all of us could not only reduce the amount of food we throw away, but also help complete its life cycle, by returning it back to the earth from which is came. Some of us already enjoy the convenience of our own composting systems – a Bokashi Bucket in the kitchen or a worm farm in the backyard enables us to produce our own natural fertilisers for gardens and pot plants. But have you ever thought that your food scraps and the rich nutrients they store could help fertilise crops in the Murray-Darling Basin? It’s not a dream for the future – it’s actually happening now. Governments at state and local levels have begun trials collecting domestic food organic waste, composting it through large centralised composting systems and sending it back to where it came from in the first place. It’s an idea whose time has come and hopefully it won’t be long before a new domestic food organic collection bin complements the growing variety of brightly coloured bins sitting in your driveway. In the meantime, while we wait for our Government to introduce food organics collection schemes, don’t forget that you can already reduce your own waste by up to 60% simply by having your own composting system at home and using it to lovingly tend your own backyard wilderness.

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