Thursday 28 April 2011

Compost Awareness Week 2011

The eleventh annual international Compost Awareness Week will be celebrated from Sunday 1st to Sunday 8th May 2011.  The week aims to encourage more people to realise the benefits of home composting and using peat-free composts made from recycled material.

We are marking Compost Awareness Week 2011 with volunteers from Shropshire Master Composters set to organise a series of ‘composting clinics’ where residents can drop by and receive face-to-face advice from an experienced ‘Master Composter’.

Date
Time
Location
Sunday 1st May 2011

Sunday 1st May 2011
 


Greenwood Trust, Ironbridge
Byeways, Whittington
Monday 2nd May 2011
10 am – 3 pm
Welshampton Village Hall, Welshampton
Tuesday 3rd May 2011
Shrewsbury,
Town Square, Shrewsbury
Wednesday 4th May 2011
Oswestry Market, Baileys Head, Oswestry
Thursday 5th May 2011
10am - 2pm
Albrighton Retired Mens (ARMS) Club, Albrighton
Friday 6th May 2011
 TBC
 TBC, Ludlow
Saturday 7th May 2011

Attingham Park, Atcham

Wyevale Nursery, Telford
Sunday 8th May 2011
Attingham Park, Atcham


For more information on composting and how to get a discounted home compost bin through the Council scheme visit http://www.recycleforshropshire.com/

Did you know?

  • If we composted all of the available food waste produced by UK households we could avoid the equivalent of 2,000,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year.

Food waste training


Following on from the basic Love Food Hate Waste awareness event we organised last year, we have had some additional funding to run community cooking classes, workshops and training for local community groups, active community leaders and the like. It will be lead by a proper foody chefy person, so you can get some practical tips on portion control, menu planning, food storage, preperation and the like with the emphasis on how to waste less food, saving money and the planet.


There's two dates for training:
Monday 9th May 2011 - 10am - 12.30 pm at the Shropshire Wildlife Trust, Shrewsbury
Tuesday 31st May 2011- 10am - 12.30 pm at the Shropshire Wildlife Trust, Shrewsbury
Open to anyone. To book your place contact Joy Blizzard, Shropshire Council, 01743 255991 joy.blizzard@shropshire.gov.uk

Wednesday 20 April 2011

How to set up a food co-op

 GETTING STARTED
How to set up a food co-op 
or buying group in
your community. 

16 May 2011,  
FREE Event
@ SHREWSBURY COFFEEHOUSE

Food Co-ops are a practical way in which local people can take control of where their food comes from.  This talk will explain how co-ops and buying groups work, look at some case studies, and offer guidance on how to start a new group or develop an existing one.

There will be time for discussion and networking: find existing groups in your area, connect with suppliers or be inspired to start a new initiative.

If you are a community group, food producer, food social enterprise, existing co-op, public health professional, or anyone with an interest in community food, then come along and find out more.

**N.B. Please book a place so we know how much tea and cake to provide !
          Contact : Pete Norton -  07974 447905  pete@sustainweb.org
OR Contact Jessicah Kendrick – 07582 601 272 jessicahkendrick@gmail.com

This event is organised by Sustain in partnership with Transition Shrewsbury and THE SHREWSBURY COFFEEHOUSE as part of the
Making Local Food Work programme.

Sunday 10 April 2011

Oswestry Show

One of the larger events we like to get along to is the Oswestry Show which is an annual event held on the Showground just outside Oswestry.  The event aims to promote rural ideas and food and so seems to complement the home composting message well.  The event is hugely popular and attracts thousands of people each year.

We are supported by the Councils Waste Management contractor Veolia who supply us with a mobile exhibition trailer for this event.  This is a fantastic resource which saves us the huge effort of transporting and erecting a bespoke display each time. 




We are blessed with an extremely dedicated and well organised bunch of volunteers in the Oswestry area who man the event and help to encourage people to compost with face to face advice and provision of information and marketing material. 

Tudor Griffiths - Part II

The amazing thing about the site is that amongst all this apocolyptic industrial landscape there is a nature reserve!  Its part of a former sand and gravel extraction area itself, as opposed to restored landfill, but it does highlight just how tough and resilient nature can be. 

We were blessed with some awesome weather on the day and some fantastic birdlife turned up to greet us. Our guide explained that this site was a particular hotspot for waders due to its shallow water and that although there were some local successes (in particular the amount of Lapwing which overwinter here) generally these species were all declining nationally.

Over 5 acres of the site has been left to go back to wetland and its managed by the Shropshire Wildlife Trust and there are two main hides for the twitchers which also get used for environmental education study tours.  We were lucky enough to see a huge range of birds on our visit including Buzzards, Lapwings, Oyster catchers, a well hidden great crested Grebe, various ducks and a wood pecker.  










We are very grateful to the volunteer wardens and the Shropshire Wildlife Trust for their co-operation and support with this and in particular for Judy from Shrewsbury Friends of the Earth for organising the visit.

Visit to Tudor Griffiths Landfill

A bunch of us Master Composters, along with some members of Shrewsbury Friends of the Earth, Shropshire Organic Gardeners and Shropshire Community Recycling Ltd, recently paid a visit to the Tudor Griffiths landfill site near Ellesmere. 

This business manages over 75,000 tonnes of mainly construction and demolition waste from the Shropshire and Cheshire area each year.  The site includes the operation of a non-hazardous waste landfill site alongside recycling and sand and gravel extraction operations.  The company also operates commercial waste collection, skip hire, haulage, concrete and building merchant businesses which compliment each other in an intergrated manner.



The company has recently been successful in appliying for over £200,000 grant from the governments Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP) which has gone towards the contruction of a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) at their landfill site in Ellesmere, Shropshire.


As a result of this, all skip material from their skip hire business (which previously would have gone straight to landfill) is first taken to this MRF for pre-treatment.  As a result over 90% of the material is now being recycled which is pretty incredible recovery rates by any standard. 

Part of the reason for the very high recycling rates is that over 40% of all the waste coming into the site is just soil and rubble from construction sites.   Most of this can be pretty simply screened off by passing the material through a trommel.  This fraction of the waste stream is extremely useful for running a landfill site as it can be used for on site engineering operations, stablisation of land, roadbuilding and daily cover which is required. 


But also some of this is sold on as recycled aggregates and some is done using reverse haulage, so its send back to the building sites in the very same skips which their waste arrived in! 

Once the heavy and rocky fraction of the waste has been removed the material gets sent through the MRF where recyclable materials such as tyres, plastics, metals and wood, are initially removed by hand picking.  


Ferrous metals are easily removed with magnets and this happens repeatedly at each stage of the operation.  Even the little nails present in wood and hinges and knobs off kitchen units and doors get removed at the wood shredding stage with magnets.  The wood then gets sold on to Kronospan at their local factory in Chirk which makes MDF (medium density fibreboard).


They showed us one of the new cells which is being prepared for future landfilling.  The entire stetch is first lined with a plastic liner, to keep all the nasty stuff well contained, its like making a garden pond!  An even here they are recycling, using shredded car tyres which is replacing other construction materials, for a lightweight backfill material in their leachate collection system.


Thats very important because once operational the site will hold thousands of tonnes every year of black bag waste collected from their business collections as well as rejects from the MRF.  The rubbish gets deposited on the landfill in thin layers, which are subjected to compaction by a 42 tonne purpose built compactor machine with steel toothed wheels. 

But of course this rubbish rots and it gets rained on and it produces a dirty liquid called leachate which has to be managed very seriously because of the sensitive watercourses nearby.  All the leachate gets collected up into big tanks and is taken to the sewage treatment works in Monkmoor, Shrewsbury to be treated and made safe.


Another environmental initiative on the site is the capture and recovery of methane.  In the past landfill sites used to vent this gas direct to the atmosphere where is acts as a powerful greenhouse gas exacerbating global warming.  However due to increasing regulation these sites now have to capture this gas and it makes sense economically to recover energy from it.

The Wood Lane site burns the gas in a 1MW generator and produces enough electricity to power around 300 homes.  They are currently investigating the potential to also utilise the waste heat from this operation for drying wood and so this would be both a more efficient power process but also improving the quality and value of their recyclate as a result.


Its clear that the entire business operation at this site has been transformed in the past few years.  They have gone from being a landfill operation to a predominantly recycling based waste management operation.  They are increasingly not just a waste management business but a resource management company with reclaimed aggregates now being a fundamental part of their business alongside the virgin material which they extract.

Everyone was very impressed by the dedication and professionalism of the staff on site and their commitment to minimising environmental impacts of their operation.  What they showed us was that a well managed landfill site can peacefull co-exist both with a sensitive local nature reserve but also with the local community.

A big thank you has to go to our hosts from Tudor Griffiths who gave up hours of their time to give us and excellent guided tour of the facility and to Judy from Shrewsbury FoE for organising what was a fascinating trip.

Thursday 7 April 2011

WRAP highlight carbon impact of food waste

A new report published recently by WRAP has highlighted the shocking water and carbon footprint of wasted household food for the first time.

The report, The Water and Carbon Footprint of Household Food Waste in the UK - jointly published by WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and WWF recently - found that water used to produce food that householders in the UK then waste represents 6% of the UK’s water requirements (6.2 billion cubic metres per year). 

The 6.2 billion cubic metres of water used unneccessarily to produce this food that householders waste every year is nearly twice the annual household water usage of the UK. The same wasted food also represents 3% of the UK’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Thats the same as are created by 7 million cars each year!  

By discarding that food, the water and energy that was used to grow and process those foods is not recovered, giving off greenhouse gas emissions that could have been avoided.
The report also goes on to identify the countries of origin for wasted food because we import alot of our food from arid areas of Spain, Kenya and Israel, and so it should be thought about in the context of water scarcity in those regions too.

These figures are quite staggering.  The water footprint for wasted food – 280 litres per person, per day - is nearly twice the average daily household water use of the UK, 150 litres per person per day.

By home composting food waste you are preventing the emissions associated with landfill gas but its even better to prevent food waste in the first place because then you can save money but also prevent all this water usage too.  

Monday 4 April 2011

Rising costs of waste disposal

With the beginning of the 2011/12 financial year Landfill Tax has now risen to £56 per tonne in what is seen by waste industry experts as a “pivotal” point in terms of encouraging the uptake of alternatives to landfill disposal.

The £8 rise from the 2010/11 rate of £48 per tonne is part of the Landfill Tax escalator process. The escalator sees the tax for landfill disposal rise by £8 per tonnes each year up to 2014/15, with Chancellor George Osborne having put a guarenteed floor under the rate to ensure it will remain at £80 per tonnes for the next 15 years after that too.

The increase in Landfill Tax to £56 per tonne is seen as a key move in driving waste management companies and councils to assess other options
Of course the Landfill Tax is just one element of the landfill cost too, with haulage costs and 'gate fees' charged on top of this, for some areas the cost of landfill will rise over the £100 per tonne threshold at which point, thermal treatment and other alternative waste disposal options will become more economic. 

Whilst many have criticised the Landfill Tax as a stealth tax which requires Councils to collect nearly £1billion more Council tax which they then have to pay to the government it is undoubtedly starting to prove very effective in making greener options affordable.   Whilst in the short term it will put more pressure on stretched Council budgets in the long term it will force Councils and businesses to stop landfilling so much rubbish and send more waste for energy production instead.

Compostable nappies

Being an earth-conscious new mum, I was determined that I would have an eco-baby and to only use washable nappies. I soon found however that having to wake up and feed her every three hours was one thing but having to change her washable nappy at the same time was just too much! I suggested to my husband that we used a disposable nappy just at nightime as this should last baby through the night without causing nappy rash. Unfortunately I found out that hubby had actually been listening to me over the past few years as I ranted on about waste and recycling and he was adamant that using a disposable nappy was just not acceptable (note it was not him getting up and feeding and changing baby every three hours!). I did some research and found that the most eco-friendly disposable nappy claimed to be over 50% biodegradable and have lots of other super-eco features and hubby’s response – if we were to use them, we would have to compost them rather than sending to landfill.

So, we emptied out a 250l compost bin, put in some twiggy stuff at the bottom, and a bit of ready compost to give it a boost and set to with putting in the disposable nappies in this compost bin. I must make it clear that we only put in wet nappies, not soiled ones, those did go to landfill!  I thought back to training Master Composters and how to get the nappies composting well and decided that nappies must be carbon rich, so a brown material and that I would need to balance this with some green. It was winter and I didn’t have much green stuff so instead every week or so added in a handful of chicken manure (such as SuperDug). Once the weather hotted up I would add a layer of grass cuttings every now and again. I kept the lid off the bin most of the time as of course being super-absorbent, it was important to ensure there was enough moisture in there. Also, I cut the nappies open when adding so that the composting bugs could easily get to work on the nappy innards.

And now 21 months later with baby no. two on the way and the compost bin nearly full I decided I really needed to do something other than just keep filling the nappy compost bin so I set to to dig it out. I was really pleasantly surprised, hubby’s exact words were “Amazing”. At the bottom of the bin I found some really lovely rich looking compost and the bin was full of worms and other creepy crawlies; I have put this as a mulch on my asparagus bed.  On the negative side, I had to pull out the bits of nappy that didn’t compost ie the waterproof liner and the plastic tabs but I was surprised how little of this  undegraded stuff there was. The compost did smell a bit but I suspect this was because there wasn’t much air in the mix rather than because of the nappies. I have now re-filled the bin with the partly composted nappies and used egg boxes and twigs to add lots of air into the structure and am hoping for even greater things!

Of course composting nappies isn’t something we would recommend to the general public but as Master Composters I thought you would like to hear proof that the staff at Garden Organic really are as passionate (obsessive?) as you about composting!







a)  Picture of opening up the bin

 











 
b)  Emptying the bin out. It really wasn’t as disgusting as it looks! Ready compost in the small wheelbarrow.










This article was provided by Harriet Kopinska - Garden Organic

Friday 1 April 2011

Wild Spring Festival - Telford - 13.04.2011

If you like wildlife get yourself down to this free day out hosted by our friends at the Shropshire Wildlife Trust.


Getting children growing

St Peter’s Primary School in Wem, North Shropshire is working with Garden Organic an the Schools Food Partnership to develop a whole new ethos to food in school.  The project which has attracted National Lottery funding involves a number of different aspects including; growing your own, composting food waste, keeping chicken, undertaking farm visits, general environmental education, healthy eating, training for catering staff and involving the children and their parents in food preparation and cooking.
Teachers have been involved to make sure the work is carefully crafted so its built into the curriculum.  Its meant the entire school timetable being redrawn to work around the seasons and allow them to plant and harvest the crops, the amount and type of cooking to be completed and links to ethical issues such as, for example, fair trade or food miles.

The children have helped design and installed a fabulous new garden which has raised beds for food production.  They have a rota which requires the children allocate horticultural tasks between them.  The food produced is used in home economics lessons and for the school canteen staff to create healthy school dinners.  The school cook has been instrumental in developing the project, supported by Shire Services catering.