What we accept

“Just because something can be composted, doesn’t mean it’s good for the soil.”
— The worms 🪱

We want to make the best quality compost possible! So that it can nourish the soil ecosystem and be used to grow organic, nutritious kai for the community.

Our composting staff manually sort through your food scraps by hand to remove potential contaminants from entering our soils and food systems. Even though they use gloves and wear masks, it is unpleasant, unhygienic and can cause diseases to spread.

Please help us look after Te Taiao by following these 5 steps:

  1. Read through the guide below

  2. Share with your workplace or household so that everyone is familiar with the do’s and don’ts

  3. Print this A4 guide to stick up next to your food scrap bucket

  4. Stop & think - would I want this item to be put in the soil for growing veggies?

  5. Keep contaminants out of the compost

Top 5 sources of contamination

  1. Fruit stickers. We receive over 300 stickers every week! Particularly on mandarins, kiwis and bananas. This costs us time & money to remove by hand. Please remove them before adding to the compost bucket.

  2. Paper, napkins, kitchen towels, baking paper and cardboard. They do not benefit soil microbes or make good quality compost, and are often contaminated with chemicals. Better to recycle them! We add enough brown material to our compost already (woody mulch donated by arborists).

  3. Compostable packaging and cups do not fully break down in our composting system, are harmful to soil microbes and can leach chemicals into the soil (more info below).

  4. Hair, nail clippings or tooth floss are tapu and do not align with tikanga Māori - as bodily wastes should be keep separate from food (and soil used to grow food). They can also be a source of chemical contamination and are unhygienic for staff to handle.

  5. Meat, fish or dairy can attract pests and spread disease.

  • Unfortunately, most teabags contain plastic, which is why we love loose-leaf tea leaves the most!

    See a list of plastic-free tea bag brands that we accept here.

    As a general rule of thumb, tea bags tied together with a string tend to be compostable, whereas tea bags that are sealed with something else usually have plastic or chemical contaminants.

    We also accept 100% paper coffee filters.

  • We accept all citrus fruits like lemons and limes.

    The acidity of citrus fruits can be harmful to worms.

    However, because of the sheer volume of food scraps we collect each week (nearly a tonne!), our composting system gets hot enough (up to 70 degrees!) to break down the acids in citrus fruits in the early stages of composting. It’s too hot for worms and invertebrates at this stage, that tend to come out to play once the compost pile has cooled down. By that time, all the citrus fruit has degraded.

  • Kaicycle no longer accepts compostable single-use packaging/serviceware, including paper/cardboard/starch/wool-based products as well as bioplastic products. This includes coffee cups, takeaway containers, cutlery, food wrappers/bags, and wool insulation from food boxes/meal kits.

    This is for several reasons: 

    • It is often very difficult to tell the difference between home compostable, commercially compostable and non-compostable products, resulting in us receiving items (like conventional plastics) that we can’t compost (contamination);

    • Even if a product is certified as being home or commercially compostable, it may not break down well in our composting system, which is different to typical commercial composting operations;

    • Compostable packaging is tricky for us to process and doesn’t add any value to our finished compost, and ultimately, our soil;

    • There is a lack of transparency about chemical additives in compostable packaging, and increasing evidence that many common packaging additives do not break down and may be harmful to soil, ecological and human health;

    • All single-use products have a high resource and emissions cost. We support choosing reusable over single-use products, which are more climate-friendly. 

    We are now only accepting the compostable liners we provide in our drop-off service for households, but we are sending these to landfill due to the above concerns about their ecological impact. We hope to phase out our use of single-use products completely in future.

Get in touch if you’re unsure

Please feel welcome to email us if you have any queries :-)