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The first bunches of bananas to be grown using food scraps collected from Evelyn Page Retirement Village in Ōrewa are ripening and will soon be ready for tasting.
Last week the Ryman Healthcare village celebrated the milestone of diverting more than 50 tonnes of food scraps from landfill since they joined a pioneering local composting scheme called City to Farm three years ago.
They marked the occasion with Betsy and David Kettle from City to Farm who delivered one of the first bunches of bananas grown using the compost made from the food scraps.
Betsy calculates that the village had now diverted 138 tonnes of greenhouse gases from the environment.
“It’s quite a significant milestone and with the village being our biggest contributor, they have played an essential role in the study,” Betsy says.
It was Evelyn Page resident Graeme Howard who first suggested that the village join the City to Farm pilot after reading about it in Hibiscus Matters back in 2019.
“I thought all this stuff is going to waste, why not do something with it?” Graeme says.
Village manager Jill Clark agreed, along with the village chef, who encouraged the whole team to get on board with collecting food scraps.
The process involves caregivers and kitchen staff collecting food scraps while layering in scoops of a bokashi zing, a mix of micro-organisms which ferment and breakdown the waste into an odourless matter. The fermenting process, which is anaerobic and doesn’t create methane, also means the breakdown is faster when the food waste is eventually exposed to air.
The City to Farm team collect around seven 80-litre bins from Evelyn Page each week and deliver them to Phil Grainger, a local farmer who has converted his land into a series of swales alongside banana palms. The food matter is deposited into these for further composting. Worms continue the breakdown over a few weeks and rainwater washes the nutrients into the swales, significantly boosting the growth of the banana palms while improving the soil.
Phil says previously, the land could barely feed cows and now there is about 250km of swale so more food scraps are needed.
“Growing bananas locally rather than importing them with their associated food miles avoids greenhouse gas emissions, and growing them organically rather than using energy and fossil-fuel intensive chemical fertiliser is another way to avoid those emissions,” Betsy said.
In the three years since the scheme began, Betsy says around 15 commercial organisations have signed up, ranging from schools and kindergartens to restaurants, cafés, and a fruit and vegetable market.
Betsy urges other businesses, including local retirement villages, to get involved, flagging a government proposal which may soon require them to separate food waste from general waste by law.
“While separating food scraps is more expensive and time consuming than not doing so, it is about ‘doing the right thing’,” Betsy says. “It is great that Evelyn Page is ahead of the game and helping to develop low carbon options to deal with business food scraps.”
She and husband David are managing the scheme under the umbrella of Hibiscus Coast Zero Waste, with research assistance from Massey University Palmerston North and a grant from Auckland Council.
After seeing the contribution Evelyn Page is making to the pilot, Ryman Healthcare is focusing on ideas for its other villages around the country to dispose of food scraps.
A number of local retirement villages, including Evelyn Page, are also part of the collection of newspapers by Ōrewa Lions for reuse in erosion control.
