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making composting cool
making composting cool

KaiFebruary 16, 2019

Why we need to make composting cool

making composting cool
making composting cool

Composting plays a huge role in the fight against climate change, but how do we inspire people to actually do it?

Dr Niki Harre doesn’t talk about behaviour change when it comes to sustainability. Instead, she talks about cultural transformation, the likes of which we’re seeing play out before our eyes.

This transformation is what earns us looks of approval for getting our takeaway flattie in a KeepCup, and has us juggling stacks of groceries out of the supermarket after forgetting a reusable bag.

This, according to Harre, is us developing cultural habits. A professor of psychology at Auckland University, she has spent her career studying the psychology of sustainability. “People want to do what those around them are doing,” Harre says. “We tend to do things out of sheer mimicry, or because it feels socially appropriate, or it feels like a part of our identity.”

Dr Niki Harre has spent her career studying the psychology of sustainability (Photo: Supplied)

Whether you want to call it a revolution or simply great green marketing, we know that we are capable of change. With that in mind, there’s one unsung habit that desperately needs to join the ranks: composting.

It’s not a new concept, but for where we find ourselves today, it is absolutely critical. In fact, composting, and what we do with our compost, has the potential to reverse climate change. It just needs a better marketing campaign.

According to composting innovator Richard Wallis, there are a couple of key reasons we need to compost. Firstly, to divert ‘waste’ from the landfill. Right now, about half of what Auckland households chuck in the bin is food or garden scraps, and could be composted.

What many people don’t understand is that their broccoli stalks and orange peels don’t magically return to the earth when they’re taken to the landfill. Instead, starved of oxygen, they break down anaerobically to produce methane.

This, as many New Zealanders will be painfully aware of, is a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In other words, we’re putting carbon into the atmosphere that would otherwise be going back into the ground.

So that’s reason one. The second reason is both complex and astonishingly simple, and is all about what we can be doing with compost. “To put it simply,” Wallis says, “laying compost on the earth allows nature’s natural carbon recycling mechanism to take place.”

After all, he explains, it’s been a closed-loop system for billions of years, before humans evolved, named this organic resource as ‘waste’ and invented trucks to cart it away.

“This gets to the real guts of fighting climate change,” says Wallis, who designs and works with communities to implement sustainable solutions. “When plants photosynthesise, they act as a carbon pump, cycling it out of the atmosphere and into the ground. This is called carbon sequestering, and compost enriches the whole process.”

It doesn’t stop with climate change, though. Wallis explains that the food grown in this carbon-rich soil is nutrient-dense and provides food security, something we need to prioritise.

The New Zealand Box is a rat-proof composting box system that digests community volumes (about 100 households worth) of organic matter (Photo: Supplied)

OK, so we’re starting to grasp how important this is. But what are the solutions and how do we weave them into our society? According to Harre, it’s a matter of working with human psychology to inspire people to participate in a compost culture.

She says this begins by starting conversations around food waste, making it uppermost in people’s minds. “Each individual can do this, starting at their workplace,” Harre says, “From there, it really doesn’t take long for people to get on board.”

Once we begin to see our food scraps as a valuable commodity, the next challenge becomes what to do with them. How do we join the dots to restore nature’s circular economy?  

For those keen to get their hands dirty, The Compost Collective is a great resource and runs composting workshops for beginners. If home composting isn’t an option, initiatives such as Share Waste are popping up, connecting people who have food scraps with their composting neighbours.

Meanwhile, We Compost, an Auckland compost collection company, picks up around 40 tonnes of organic food scraps a week. This is mainly from restaurants and corporates, and gets taken to a large-scale composting facility in Tuakau.

However, Wallis says the most effective solution is in a community setting. “Food scraps, leaves, garden ‘waste’, coffee grinds and compostable packaging is best composted either in community gardens or urban agriculture,” he says.

The inevitable question springs to mind – what about the government? Shouldn’t there be council-led compost collection? Under the current Waste Plan, which prioritises home and community composting, this is the last resort. And according to Wallis, this is for good reason.

A kerbside collection would collect food scraps, anaerobically break them down, and burn the (aforementioned) methane that’s produced. Instead, Wallis says the government needs to deliver on their promised support for community solutions.  As is often the case, there is much more to this story than meets the eye. You can learn more about the current Waste Plan here.

So, back to the community. Wallis is the designer behind New Zealand Box, a rat-proof composting box system that digests community volumes (about 100 households worth) of organic matter.

OMG (Organic Market Garden) is an urban agriculture project on Symonds Street in Auckland (Photo: Supplied)

As the vision of urban agriculture starts to take hold, his boxes are cropping up throughout the country. One example is in the OMG (Organic Market Garden) urban agriculture project on Auckland’s Symonds Street.

At OMG, they grow organic food in the middle of the city, sell it to restaurants, and simply could not do it without food scraps. Among many things, it’s a teaching hub, where anyone can come to learn composting and food growing skills to put towards their own community systems.

With projects like this, Wallis says there is rarely a shortage of volunteers, given how intensely satisfying the work is. “Composting this local resource and using it to grow food is a primal instinct with deep roots,” he says.

It builds community – people have more contact with each other in a common enterprise, they forge strong bonds, and become more trusting of each other.

This is what Harre’s latest work (and her book, The Infinite Game) is all about. She says that to participate in the common good, people need to trust that others share our values. These community farms and gardens are a chance for us to get stuck in, side by side, with a common goal (saving our earth) in mind.

Jayden Klinac, founder of For The Better Good (Photo: Supplied)

One enterprise, For The Better Good, is tackling single-use plastic to drive change for this model of circular economy. They sell water in plant-based, compostable water bottles. More importantly though, they actually collect the bottles using collection bins, and compost them in boxes like Wallis’.  

Founder Jayden Klinac says the answer to climate change lies in decentralised, community composting all over the world. “In Wellington, we’ve got a garden getting built where we’re composting, ” says Klinac. “The compost goes on the garden and the food is donated to a local charity (Wellfed) who teach families how to prepare healthy, affordable meals.”

As Harre says, culture change is a combination of so many things. We need some excellent marketing (read: Instagrammable compost piles), community engagement, and governments providing the funding to entrench the habits as we build them.

Right now, it’s about starting the conversations. By starting where we are, we can help compost make the comeback of the millennium.

alex (5)

KaiFebruary 14, 2019

10 more lollies that Cadbury can ruin next

alex (5)

It might feel like Cadbury has done enough damage already, but things could just be getting started. 

First Cadbury came for Roses, and we all screamed. Then they came for the marshmallow eggs, and we all screamed again. Then they cut down their Family Bar size, and we started to tire of screaming. When their parent company Mondelez, owner of Pascall, came for our Jet Planes and Jubes, and we gave a little half-hearted grunt. 

Fed up with the constant slew of destabilising confectionery news, I have decided to take matters into my own hands. With over 27 years in the business of eating lollies and choco, I am more than qualified to predict 10 more things that Cadbury and Pascall can still do to fuck up your beloved products in the name of savings. Peace be with you.

1) Untwirl the Twirls

I’m no expert, but I predict the high-tech machine that puts the twirl into Twirls probably costs about nine billion bucks, give or take. Let’s keep those puppies straight as an arrow and watch the savings roll in. Call it a Luxury Flake and I’ll call you a bloody elitist wanker.

2) Mylk Shakes

It’s 2019: nobody drinks milk any more. To keep up with the public’s burgeoning need for alternative milks, I would suggest swapping out Milk Shakes for Mylk Shakes – with an exciting lucky dip from a range of mylks including oat, soy, almond, cashew and perhaps even breast.

3) Kill the Buzz

To show a more safety-conscious and responsible side to the company, Cadbury could revamp the little bee dude on the Buzz Bar with a cool helmet and groovy knee pads. If they really wanted to be responsible, they could also give him a pair of pants to cover his weird bee penis.

4) Coconut Smooth

Think of the soft, spongey palate of the modern day consumer, raised on nothing but smoothie bowls, fine yoghurts and seedless grapes. Smoothing out Cadbury’s Coconut Rough for this cotton wool-wrapped, selfie-taking, snowflake, burnt-out, weak-mouthed generation might just be the ticket to PR heaven.

5) Party Pack < Workplace Pack

I’ll be honest, I can’t remember the last time I saw a Party Pack at a party. Let me rephrase that: I can’t remember the last time I went to a party. What I do know for sure is that nothing sets a workplace alight like a debate about which Party Pack lolly is the best lolly. If they lean in to this new corporate branding opportunity, sales would soar. Just look at this invaluable Slack PR.

Ed’s note: Alice wrote spare mint leaf instead of spearmint leaf on purpose to try to catch everyone out, she swears ?

6) Flake it till you make it

If it’s only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate that gets the people going, then Cadbury should give them more of what they want. Put the Flakes in a giant blender. Pulverise the Flakes. Turn the Flakes into a dust so fine you can snort it. Vape a Flake.

7) QUARTER the marshmallow eggs

The world is on fire, who gives a fuck.

If you thought this was rock bottom, you were wrong.

8) Vino gums

Griffins already have their booze-named biscuits that don’t have a whisper of booze, so it’s time for Pascall to rise to the occasion. Inject the wine gums with real wine, you cowards.

9) Rocky Road

Now… with actual road!!!

10) Summer Rolls… all year round

You know what would actually be a really simple fix? If they replaced every product in their range with Summer Rolls. They’re dry, they’re nougaty, and nobody has bought one since 1929. Now THAT’s what the people really want.