Waiheke High School has taken delivery of a new composting system that will repurpose food waste for their school food gardens.
After conducting a food waste audit at the school, student ambassadors crunched the numbers and found that 57 percent of the school’s waste is food waste that goes into landfill. Waiheke High is the first school on the motu to get a community composter installed, joining around 40 other schools across Auckland.
A 1.2 square metre CarbonCycle community composter was delivered on Monday, 8 August. The composter can convert over five tons of organic matter into compost annually. Richard Wallace from CarbonCycle and staff from the Waiheke Resources Trust ( WRT) were on hand to help to set up the composter, along with the school’s ‘sustainability prefects’. The project was given a head start thanks to Mike Fogarty from Compost Co, a subsidiary of the WRT, who delivered mulch and organic waste from their Te Motu composting site, which composts food waste and compostable packaging from local restaurants and supermarkets.
Mike says Compost Co have 12 composters at Te Motu and he was happy to “help Richard out with supplies to kickstart” the school’s program.
As well as schools having bins, big commercial operators like Eden Park have adopted a zero-waste policy. Food scraps from the stadium’s events are recycled into compost to feed a small-scale market garden. • Jim Birchall
Full story in this week’s Gulf News… Out Now!!!
