Food Scrap Friday

Schools and communities can work together to reduce food waste with this feel-good composting project, says COSTA GEORGIADIS

It’s 8.30am at the school gate. Children are turning up with buckets of food scraps collected from home, and parent volunteers are weighing and recording the week’s haul. Once the bell rings, the volunteers and members of the green team take the scraps to the compost bins and load and layer them. By 10am, it’s all over, and the parents melt away.

We’re at Camdenville Public School in Newtown, New South Wales, but this idea would work anywhere. In this inner western suburb of Sydney, composting has become a community collective that’s literally gaining weight – now in the tonnes – as it brings the locals together. What’s more, as a hyperlocal activity, the energyto-output ratio of this composting project is the best I have seen. No trucks to pick up and transport waste to a centralised facility, no machines to turn the compost or transport it to end users, and no plastic packaging in sight. This is the real deal.

in the beginning

From the moment I heard about the Food Scrap Friday project, I was smitten. First there’s the name: simple, catchy and self explanatory. The idea was incubated back in 2015 by the keen gardeners at the Camdenville Paddock Community Garden which, through a land-use agreement, is part of Camdenville Public School. The gardeners decided that they wanted to get the school community more involved with their garden, and figured the best way to do that was to generate engagement around reducing the amount of waste going into landfill. By redirecting food scraps to the school, they could make compost where they needed it and build soil for free.

The idea of community composting was warming up, but the real light-bulb moment came when the conversations and plans morphed into the idea of a single drop-off event at the school gates one day a week. Food Scrap Friday began on October 21, 2016 when community gardeners Georgina Eldershaw and Lachlan Jobbins and his son Jack received the first deposit of scraps: a total of 7kg on day one. The school newsletter and social media unleashed the enthusiasm to the school’s families and by the end of 2016 – two months after the project kicked off – a total of 310kg had been delivered.

the nitty gritty

Like any call-out for help it’s important to understand that you have to be careful what you ask for. You can’t just say, “Hey, let’s unleash this on a community of 300 families” and not expect to have some challenges. At the start of this project, scraps were turning up in plastic bags, so to eliminate them from the operation old catering buckets were purchased from the equivalent of the local tip shop, Reverse Garbage. (A non-profit operation, it’s a Sydney-wide institution alongside its neighbour The Bower for all types of recycled materials.) The catchy Food

Scrap Friday Logo was stencilled onto the white buckets and so began what is now an iconic Friday image: Food Scrap Friday buckets across the suburb being lifted into and out of car boots, carried by foot and even better sitting proud on cargo bicycles converging on the collection point inside the school’s front gates.

Critical to any project of this calibre is the importance of record keeping. By recording the daily delivery quantities, the information becomes valuable data and storytelling fodder to provide information to the organisers, motivation for participants and validation to other parties, such as the council, the school, the Department of Education and other community enablers wanting to start similar projects elsewhere.

As the scraps rolled in there were more than 20 compost bins spread around the

community garden, but it wasn’t obvious what stage the different bins were at. A simple signage system was developed: 1. Feed Me, 2. Screw or Turn Me, and 3. Use Me. This gave volunteers a visual cue as to where the compost needed to go. And, of course, as time went on, the understanding of how the bins work and what balance of ‘green’ versus ‘brown’ material is required became clearer for parents and volunteers to learn and share.

In a little over 12 months, the project had composted more than 4000kg (yes, four tonnes!) of waste. The students were so engaged with this weekly habit that they came up with the idea of composting their morning tea fruit scraps. They contacted the council who provided compost caddies for every classroom. It’s a wonderful example of how allowing a project to roll out, rather than imposing it, enables participants to drive and create layers of their own, increasing buy-in to the vision.

where are they now?

By the end of 2018, two years into the project, over 9000kg (yes, 9 tonnes!) of food scraps had been delivered. Typically, they take in 140kg each week from about 35 families, nearly 4kg per family. Added