Govt offers $400k boost for composting in Northland

Composting is an effective way of putting food scraps to use while reducing carbon emissions and the amount of waste sent to landfill. Photo / Stephen Parker

Up to 1200 Northland households are to join a regional composting scheme thanks to a $400,000 Government grant and a Kaitaia-based social enterprise.

Environment Minister David Parker announced the grant, to Community Business and Environment Centre (CBEC) EcoSolutions, on Friday.

It's part of a wider drive to reduce food waste by diverting surplus food to charities feeding the needy and turning food scraps into compost instead of trucking them to landfills.

EcoSolutions manager Jo Shanks said 40 per cent of the waste sent to landfill by Northland households was organic, such as food scraps, which would be better used to improve soils and ''feed the land''.

Composting was also the most valuable action individuals could take to combat climate change and drought because compostables dumped in landfills created methane, a powerful greenhouse gas but composting secured carbon in the soil and improved water retention.

Shanks said the Community Compost Project would tackle household food waste by providing eight-week supported compost programmes and heavily discounted composting systems to 1200 households around Northland.

The second part of the project would set up 12 community compost collection hubs around the region to process up to 100 tonnes of waste from businesses and organisations over three years.

Some hubs were already operating, Shanks said.

EarthCare had been set up in Peria to deal with the huge amount of packaging created by the Lunches in Schools Programme and had already collected six tonnes of waste from Te Kao to Kāeo. The resulting compost was used in a community garden.

Another hub, Ara Rongoā Hikoi Whakaora, had been set up at Hauora Hokianga in Rawene in conjunction with a community garden and food forest on the hospital grounds.

Parker said New Zealand households threw away nearly 300,000 tonnes of food every year, half of which could still be eaten.

As well as being wasteful it contributed to New Zealand's carbon emissions.

The CBEC project was one of five in the latest funding round from the Waste Minimisation Fund.

The other projects are a mix of composting ventures and initiatives to distribute unwanted but perfectly edible food to people who need it.

"To address food waste, we need to look into ways of redistributing or reusing edible surplus food, as well as ways to divert inedible food from landfill. These projects support both,'' Parker said.

CBEC employs about 65 in a number of businesses and joint ventures providing home insulation, public transport, a plant nursery and garden centre, public swimming pool contracts, property maintenance and environmental education.

• Households can register their interest in the composting programme via the EcoSolutions website ecosolutions.org.nz. Information is also available on the Facebook page Community Compost Connection.