Waste. Scraps. Left overs. Not exactly a pretty topic to talk about. It’s what we leave on the plate when we leave a café or restaurant. Do you think about where it goes?
Usually to Landfill in a big black garbage bag. And we all know that doesn’t make the Earth a happy place.
We have partnered with the local team at The Green Helping Hand to make us more sustainable. A few times per week a little Truck comes with a helpful Green Helping Hand Teamie to take our buckets of food scraps and turn them into liquid fertiliser.
In our kitchen we have a separate bucket that we separate all food scraps into that then gets composted and turned into fertiliser.
Here, The Green Helping Hand tells us a bit about who they are and what they do…
“At the beginning of 2012 having just graduated with honours in macroeconomics from University of Newcastle I was working as a kitchen hand at the Queens Wharf Brewery while looking for work in Sydney in macroeconomic modelling. As macroeconomists do, I was analysing the business inputs-outputs and it struck me that the waste outputs from the Queens Wharf Brewery were a totally underutilised resource.
That afternoon, on my way home, I stopped at my local coffee shop, Conroy Bradley’s Pistol Club, and during a conversation with the owner Nick Tarren I raised my amazement at the volume of wasted resources at the Queens Wharf Brewery. This conversation could be described as the flap of the butterfly wings for the two young entrepreneurs. Nick Tarren made an immediate connection with this idea as in his youth he had been spent many hours with his Uncle Conroy Bradley a gardening enthusiast and worm farm extraordinaire. Such was his uncle influence Nick Tarren had named his pop up cafe after his childhood mentor on sustainable food waste practices. Ironically, this pop up cafe also became the melting pot for ideas on how to make local businesses more sustainable and the Business Partnership Commercial Cost Reductions was born in March 2012 at 278 Hunter St.
The Green Helping Hand has evolved from a business partnership called Commercial Cost Reductions and is now a co-operative of like minded business owners who see the sustainable synergy between effective waste management in local cafes, restaurants and hotels that enable the extraction of potential resources for local food production, energy production and a broad range of products that can be made from reclaimed materials.
By taking food scraps and other resources like Styrofoam boxes, some plastics and oil drums contained within businesses general waste we reduce the landfill contribution significantly. The estimated reductions in Green House Gases from composting food scraps rather than landfilling can be as high 60 percent and by making products locally from the resources that we reclaim we also reduce the volume of fossil fuels used in transportation of goods from outside our local area.”
A HUGE Thanks to The Green Helping Hand for lending us a hand in making our business more sustainable and environmentally friendly!