Image: Leura Garage owner James Howarth with some of the restaurant's food scraps that are put into a super composting machine and then used as compost in Blackheath's community garden. Credit: Blue Mountains Gazette.
Zero Waste Leura is a NSW Love Food Hate Waste Partnership project, funded by the NSW waste levy. It aims to work with Blue Mountains businesses to avoid food waste, increase awareness and reduce the environmental impact organic waste has in landfill.
ISF is working in partnership with the NSW Environment Protection Authority (NSW EPA), Blue Mountains City Council and Leura Village Association to engage, implement, market and measure food waste avoidance from Blue Mountains businesses through the NSW EPA Your Business is Food program.
This project addresses an important step in the waste management hierarchy: avoidance. By focusing on food waste avoidance, hospitality businesses can reduce organic waste generation and minimise the environmental impact and cost of organic waste disposal.
The project team are assisting Leura businesses with food waste audits, surveys and interviews, collecting qualitative data on behaviour change and attitudes, and quantitative data on food waste reduction. This will help to identify opportunities and constraints for food waste avoidance.
With many partners working together to achieve precinct-scale food waste avoidance, Zero Waste Leura presents an opportunity to develop a program model that could be replicated in other precincts and villages. ISF's research creates an evidence base for how businesses can overcome barriers to waste avoidance and minimise the volume of organic waste being sent to landfill.
Another important output of this project is a documentary video that stands as a 'blueprint' for other businesses wishing to undertake food waste avoidance activities.
Zero Waste Leura aims to strengthen community relationships in the Blue Mountains villages between businesses and local council, identify opportunities for food waste management and disposal beyond the project and created a replicable model for other villages or precincts.
Who's participating?
Registered
- 8 Things Eatery
- Blue Mountains Food Co-op
- Blue Mountains Hospital Kitchen
- Cafe Leura
- Carrington Hotel
- Gingerbread House
- Hounslow Cafe
- Little Niche Nosh
- Mountain Culture Beer Co.
- Pizza Sublime
Completed
Click here to read more project updates on the Blue Mountains City Council website.
Watch the Zero Waste Leura video
Andrea Turner: A third of the food that we produce globally for human consumption is lost or wasted and in developed countries like ours, it's mainly at that sort of commercial side.
Waste is a resource. For us it's an opportunity to you know send what would otherwise be food waste diverting it from landfill to create soils and grow food.
Robert Morrison: Food waste and other organic material breaking down is the biggest single source of emissions of greenhouse gas emissions within our local government area.
Narrator: It all started when the Leura garage invited the business community to their restaurant to pose a very important question.
James Howarth: Can Leura become the first village in Australia to eliminate 100 percent of its restaurant food waste from landfill?
Ali Munro: I was very interested in how I can potentially improve my habits. My waste, because I see a lot going into the bin and into landfill.
David Hodgekiss: Well, most cafes you're lucky if you make 10 percent profit. So, the cost of waste removal can cut into their profit quite easily if you don't control it.
Narrator: A large part of organic waste comes from food waste generated in households and in businesses such as restaurants cafes and pubs in the hospitality sector. In the organic waste value chain while opportunities are emerging to help rescue, reuse and repurpose food waste, it is important to remember that avoiding food waste generation in the first place is the best opportunity for solving our organic waste problem.
Robert Morrison: To have a project where businesses have taken a lead and developed a project that engages with other businesses to help avoid food waste then we just want to support that and make sure it's got legs.
Narrator: In October 2020 Leura garage partnered with University of Technology Sydney's Institute for Sustainable Futures and the Blue Mountain City Council to secure funding from the New South Wales EPA to make Zero Waste Leura a reality.
The New South Wales EPA Love Food Hate Waste innovation partnership project was funded by the New South Wales EPA Love Food Hate program and sought to work with Blue Mountains businesses to measure and take steps to avoid food waste over 12 months.
Deborah Shipley: Down this end we've got all our food scrap waste off our vegetable prep. This all goes into this bin which is a black bin compared to our ravings.
Narrator: Through the Zero Waste Leura project the Leura garage has been championing the delivery of the EPA Your Businesses Food program to Blue Mountains hospitality businesses.
Businesses understand like the language of money, you know you can't manage what you can't measure.
The Free program guides businesses through a three-step process of conducting a food waste review and completing an action plan to identify opportunities for avoiding food waste from spoilage preparation and plate waste.
Whilst undertaking the Your Business is Food journey, Leura garage reduced their weekly food waste by 55 kilos. That equates to a saving of around 385 dollars for that week, shaving 43 percent of food waste from every meal. They were keen to spread the awareness to the rest of the village, leading other businesses to join the fight to reduce food waste.
Andrew Tsaroumis: I thought about the amount of waste that we throw away and it's not cheap we get three collections a week. I grabbed all my staff on Monday morning, I said okay we're going to do a zero waste project and they said well what's that? Basically, what we're trying to do is count our waste. It's really given them an insight into hey never really thought about that and they're starting to ask questions of how we can reduce this.
David Hodgekiss: I bought my bins yesterday to measure the waste over a week period and actually most people are certainly interested in my staff I think it's a very good idea. But it's not going to happen unless I make them do it.
Cathy Atkinson: We've been actually watching what gets, what comes back on the plates, what is left at the end of the day in buckets and watching it actually decreasing it made us all very aware of how we operate, how we on sell what people actually can consume.
By actually measuring the amount of waste that businesses can see they're starting to put a dollar figure on that and they're able to ask more questions about how they can better manage their kitchens.
Andrea Turner: Sometimes you can't avoid it like a potato peeling if you don't want that or you don't want the top of the carrot or you know there's certain parts that you don't want. Then it's a resource, it's an enormous problem that we have to deal with and in this day and age why on earth are we wasting so many resources?
Robert Morrison: We also have a finite life on that landfill, everything we put in takes up some space that we don't get back. So, at some point that will close and that will increase costs associated with waste in in the Blue Mountains, so it is really important for us to try and preserve that landfill for as long as we can by avoiding waste in the first place.
Andrea Turner: It's just vitally important that we start thinking about how to avoid waste. That's all the water that it takes to make that food, it's all the energy, all the people, all the nutrients is all being wasted.
Narrator: Through the EPA-funded Zero Waste Leura project a key success was the development of partnerships between businesses, the local council, the state government, and the wider community to make the project a reality. The project engaged with 53 businesses. 10 businesses participated in your Business’s Food and 770 kilos of waste was measured over $5,000 of potential savings.
The project also raised awareness beyond the Leura community about the issue of food waste in hospitality businesses via newspapers, radio, social media and even an interview on sunrise morning television.
If you are interested in engaging your community in avoiding, reducing, and reusing food waste from hospitality businesses, please contact the New South Wales EPA Love Food Hate Waste program.
-END-
MEDIA
Partnership program means zero food waste - BMCC, November 2020
Leura zero food waste initiative launched – Blue Mountains Gazette, December 2020
Researchers
-
Adjunct Associate Professor -
Senior Research Consultant -
Research Director -
Research Director
Years
- 2020-2021
Client
- NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA)
Partners
- Blue Mountains City Council
- Leura Village Association
PROJECT | 2017
No flies on ISF as it leads the way in urban organics and food waste management
Ground-breaking research at UTS’s Institute for Sustainable Futures on managing food waste and reducing the amount of organic refuse going to landfill is underpinning adventurous new projects, from a maggot farm at the urban Barangaroo development to an ambitious zero-waste scheme in the Blue Mountains.
