The problem
Over the years at Kaicycle, we’ve noticed that we receive a large proportion of kai from our customers that is still good quality and could have been / could be eaten. Past internal audits show that around 20-30% of the food waste we receive from our customers is avoidable, this equates to 500-750 kgs every month! We’re talking apples and oranges, loaves of bread, pastries and pies. Once we collected a whole bucket full of red kiwifruit in perfect condition that we salvaged and turned into deliciously tangy kiwifruit compote.
While we LOVE that the kai we collect from our customers is being put to good use as compost to grow more kai for the community (instead of going to landfill which would be a huge tragedy for various environmental & social reasons) it is still less desirable than feeding the community.
Think about all the resources that go into growing an apple in Nelson: the sunlight, nutrients/fertiliser, water, time, labour, fuel, transportation, storage, commerce, stickers etc. Not eating the apple equates to a HUGE loss of all these resources. Not only that, but there is the hidden cost of having to consume another item of food to 'fill the gap' - doubling the impact.
The solutions
There are two key solutions:
Reducing food waste at source: requires behavioural change - see Love Food Hate Waste NZ for tips & recipes like making apple cider vinegar, or sign up to the month long programme with Every Bite.
Redistributing food to someone hungry: requires infrastructure change, with food rescue services like Kaibosh or The Free Store leading the way in Te Whanganui-a-tara.
The Organic Waste Hierarchy helps visualise the order of desirability of how we handle food waste.
How Kaicycle are responding
Kaicycle recently received funding from Wellington City Council’s Waste Minimisation Fund to trial a food rescue operation in parallel with our existing compost collection service.
Three of our customers have kindly offered to take part in the pilot project to see how they can reduce the amount of food going to waste: Frank's Coffee Newtown, Te Whaea National Dance & Drama Centre, and Utilities Disputes.
The pilot will help us to gain operational knowledge, test financial feasibility & assess impact before (hopefully) rolling out a food rescue collection stream among other customers in future on an opt-in basis.
As part of the funding, we will also improve our communications with the 100+ organisations & 100+ households who compost with us, to facilitate:
food waste reduction e.g. ways food could be used/redistributed/repurposed before throwing edible food into the compost, and
prevention of plastics from entering the ecosystem e.g. plastic fruit stickers which could be removed before adding to compost to save us time & money (we currently remove them by hand!)
The first haul of rescued pastries & pies from Frank’s Coffee, shared with our composting volunteers.
Huge bag of fruit from Utilities Disputes.
Cheese scones from Frank’s Coffee Newtown.
We will be weighing & taking photos of all the kai we rescue and re-distributing it to our volunteers, cyclists, composters and to the Newtown Community Fridge. Watch this space to see how much kai we are able to rescue over the course of a few months!