It’s a wonderful example of how allowing a project to roll out… enables participants to drive and create layers of their own, increasing buy-in

to this volume is a further 50kg of coffee grounds per week collected from coffee shops, which is mixed with sawdust from a local business, leaves, garden waste, straw from the chicken coop and food scraps – it’s a magical mix.

Georgina and Lachlan have been able to increase the Food Scrap Friday roster from two (them) to eight parent volunteers to choose from each week. What I witnessed on the day of filming was an incredible interaction between the volunteers and the students all working together, making composting a fun weekly part of the school routine – a compost habit at school, which creates a compost awareness at home and everywhere the students go. When composting worlds and initiatives like this collide, the results can be earth-turning.

The school is also a compost host on the ShareWaste Map (sharewaste.com – a site connecting people who have food waste with those who are composting). Locals can place scraps in a bin inside the community garden gate that’s emptied weekly.

Like Food Scrap Friday, the ShareWaste project was incubated in the same area of Sydney, Newtown. This suburb is my idea of compost heaven. Both projects enable composting at its most efficient and appropriate location… locally. What better place to teach and house a compost system than in our most accessible community hubs: local schools.

Since filming this story, and then talking about the project in Western Australia, a school community in Bunbury contacted me to say they’ve implemented a similar project. That kind of message makes a composter like me cry tears of pure humus joy.

Look out for a story on ShareWaste in a future issue of the magazine.