Food is the second biggest greenhouse polluter after power stations
This quote from the NSW EPA helps to explain why we’re growing food where we live and work in Chippendale:
‘In Australia, the food supply chain is responsible for approximately 23 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions, making it the second-highest emissions generating activity after power stations. This includes direct emissions from agriculture, and those attributed to energy, transport, food production, processing and distribution.”
NSW EPA www.lovefoodhatewaste.nsw.gov….au/love-food/environmental-impacts.aspx
For the last year or so I’ve been collecting food waste from two regular weekend markets, Saturday – Everleigh Street Markets, Carriageworks at Redfern and Sunday – Addison Road Community Centre, Marrickville.
Most of the fruit and vege stall keepers are happy as it saves fuel trucking waste back over the mountains. Some live closer and feed their chooks.
Coffee grounds, cracked eggs, bruised but edible fruit, veges, excess bread, rolls all go to worm farms (12 at last count), compost bins( 10 and growing) and my latest addition BIOPODS. My trailer is full every Saturday.
A juice stall provides five garbage bags of fine mulch although they do need sorting as the workers are flat out all day and plastic bags and rubber gloves go in as well.
I’ve got it down to a fine art now as the stall holders know me and i know them. My wife and I have bought very little fruit and veges. Our small freezer is always full of stewed apple,em plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots. We give away tables full of veges at the community garden every Sunday as the stalls pack up.
Biopods? Does your compost bin have maggots? Don’t panic! I’ve grown to love them as they munch their way through the fruit and vege scraps I load into the bins weekly. 9.5kg of food waste per square metre consumed in 24 hours is on record.
We are looking at a possible productive solution to the waste food processing business in our own backyard with not a truck or tonnes of landfill in sight. I’ve built three biopods so far and have two commercial BioPods designed in America and manufactured in Vietnam. They and my bins breed the maggots of the black soldier fly or BSF for the initiated. Loads of research happening in the US, Vietnam, Cambodia and now in Australia. Want to know more and see them in action? Feel free to give me a call 0438 686 696 or just come to the Royal Easter Show and visit my garden stall at the Great Aussie Backyard. Look for Gavin’s Aquaponic Garden. May the maggots be with you!