• Curlys café – Ending Café Food Waste – One Step at a Time
By Karen Booth
This is the story of two friends, Linda and Karen, who worked with their local cafe at North Curl Curl, on Sydney’s northern beaches, to end cafe food waste.
(The second part of the story is here.)
Karen tells their story so far, starting from when they began in February 2022 up to July 2022. There’ll soon be another blog about later steps to end food waste.
February 2022
Have you ever wondered, how much food waste a café produces, and how it is dealt with? And how can this be reduced?
Well in February this year two friends in Curl Curl decided to find out more about this, just as Compostable Kate threw out a Composting Challenge, what perfect timing. Linda and I - Karen - approached our local café, Curly’s cafe at North Curl Curl, to take on the challenge, and our story began …
• Linda and Karen composted to see how much food waste they could compost in one week for a ‘compost challenge’
Whilst we didn’t win the challenge, we did learn that in one week the Café had produced over 80kg of food waste, which we had successfully diverted to our own compost systems. After doing a little research we were amazed to discover that as 3kg of edible food waste in landfill is the equivalent of 23kg of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere, we had saved around 616kg of co2 gas from entering the atmosphere – WOW.
OK so now we wanted to keep this going, but how?
Our compost bins were already full. We had one thing in our favour, the café has a garden, and 2 unused compost bins, so we decided to purchase and donate a compost device, Subpod, to the café so we could continue the process, feeling this must be sufficient to deal with the café food waste.
Around this time, we contacted Michael Mobbs from the Sustainable House who was very supportive and has committed to helping us out with the installation of a Coolseat, which is an incredible system designed to compost large amounts of food waste quickly and conveniently on site.
A coolseat also gives the cafe another seat for up to 2 people and, when its on a footpath, the seat can be used by the community and pedestrians.
• Linda (L) and Karen (R) measuring up the cafe back garden at the start of the project
• The first compost bin
24th March 2022
From this date forward we have just about composted all of the preparation waste the café produces and have helped them also start collecting and composting napkins, paper straws. Things like avocados and eggshells also were now thrown in to the mix. It is still a learning curve for the café staff, and on searching through the bins at the end of the day, there is still lots of compostable items, that could be heading to the compost bin.
We have now assembled the Subpod, planted with mint and parsley, and are committed to composting all we can for the café, whilst we wait for council approval of the coolseat!
The Subpod was filled in a few days, so we enlisted the help of my son to dig a hole so we could partially bury the bigger of the 2 bins, and line it with chicken wire at the bottom to deter rodents, and we are on our way!!!!
• The Subpod and garden bed with lots of rain
• Coffee Hill with cardboard and work in progress - how to shrink this hill!
Coffee Hill (an existing mound of coffee ground at the back of the café has become a challenge in itself to compost!) is getting bigger; we spread a lot around the base of the compost bins.
Around 7th April
Well it didn’t take long to fill that bin, so now we have dug in bin number 2, made a lid with cardboard and a hessian sack, and this one is now filling up as well.
Within a week this one was all but full, too. Luckily the Subpods in my back garden have completed their work from the February challenge, so I am able to harvest this compost, and fill up my two Subpods with some of the contents from Curlys original black bin, this should buy us at least another week, whilst we wait on getting our meeting with the Mayor to approve the installation of the coolseat on the verge outside Curlys.
We need the coolseat to cope with these quantities …
In order to try to reduce the coffee ground hill, we are now also layering coffee grounds and wet shredded cardboard in boxes in the garden, we are adding dried grass clippings and some composting content from the Subpod, to help them on the way. The boxes get stirred up about weekly, and more grounds and carboard added on stirring. When we get the coolseat I am hoping we can add this already composting boxes and the seat will quickly finish the process for us.
Around 10th May
Grey bin hasn’t had a stir for about a month…. It looks a bit wet and full of what looks like maggot’s - big maggots, after a bit of research we find they are black soldier fly larvae.
I have also now discovered these little wrigglers eat more than worms and the output of their composting is big fat healthy black soldier fly larva, a great source of protein for my chickens, and pet food and humans apparently. (That’s another story). The output from worm farming is worm casting and tea for the garden. There is always something to learn …
20th May 2022
We had our meeting with Northern beaches council, and the Mayor has committed to giving us approval to locate the seat outside Curlys . Yeahhh….. We just need to send through dimensions to Steve, which we have, so over to these council workers now to make a decision.
• The coolseats waste calculator tells the cafe owner and us how much food waste, pollution and costs are being reduced before, during and after the various composting options
Week three data collected – 25th May
The bins had really started cooking by now! no issues with bad smells or rodents!! Coffee grounds seem to keep them away, and regular human stirring of the bins, I suspect.
At this point we agreed to start composting any table scraps/left overs as well, as we were confident the bins could cope with the waste, and business was slowing for the café due to the wet weather and the residents of Curl Curl slowly returning to office jobs at least a few days a week now the virus rules are changing ...
Paul, the cafe owner, estimates coffee grounds down to between 3 to 6kg a day now, and he has decided to close on Mondays, as business is so slow. He expects things to pick up again August time, especially if the Curl Curl football and netball teams do well and make it to the finals ... fingers crossed.
Whilst the composting continues to cook well, and our worm population is thriving, we are not having much luck with getting produce to grow in the Subpod garden bed!!!
Probably due to the amount of rain fall which has been extreme, and in addition to this some little caterpillar thing is attacking our plantings …. Whilst the parsley at the back of the garden is trying to grow this too is not enough yet to supply the café … The mint in the Subpod, which I thought would take over continues to try and poke through, but we do not yet have an abundance. We will keep trying! The main thing is lots of food waste is not going to land fill!
We also picked up a worm farm this week, courtesy of the nextdoor social app, and had an appearance on Channel 9 Today Show – No publicity is bad publicity….. We are using the worm farm to try to eat through some more of coffee hill, and have added a third coffee cardboard box to assist in eating the hill as well …
• The coolseats food waste calculator is free to download from the website and we’re using it to measure how much food waste the cafe composts and how much the cafe waste bill costs are reduced
Week 4 Data collected – 1st June
Similar quantities to last week, the café are doing two main days of food preparation, a box of bananas chopped and frozen, pineapples and oranges skinned and chopped/frozen for juices.
Still closed on Mondays.
With this winter load we seem to be just about coping, composting the food waste on site. My Subpod at home are just about done so if necessary, I can relocate another load from the black bin, but hopefully we will have the cool seat in a week or two.
Coffee Hill still there, we seem to be keeping it constant (Just), but not yet reducing it, hopefully the arrival of the cool seat will allow us to compost the lot and get on top of it before summer arrives and the preparation waste pumps up again. Watch this space.
We are also planning a no dig garden in the space at the back.
The price of lettuce has gone from $12 a box to $42 a box!
• The calculator automatically calculates pollution and cost savings and graphs the data to make it easier to understand. We hope it helps Paul, the cafe owner, to track his waste and end it soon.
• Summary showing the four week total in June - the calculator can do another four weeks at a time by clearing the data and that’s underway so more data can be obtained
4th July 2022
Yeahh - we have received approval from the council to install the Coolseat on the grass verge outside the café.
So what have we learnt so far about composting on scale at Curly’s Café ?
• Amazingly there is very little smell from the compost, as long as enough brown/dry matter is added in this case it is mainly paper towels, napkins, paper straws and some cardboard.
• Once those worms are up in population and the tank is full, its around 3 weeks for them to do the job, incredible work by the works…
• How much can they compost? So far we are keeping up with waste production, but still need to bring some back to my home system every few weeks. Watch this space to see if the Coolseat handles the waste as the Café starts to create more again over the summer smoothie and juice season.
• No rats. We thought we may have an issue with rodents which would have meant us stopping the process, as rats and cafes do not mix, but no evidence of rodents at all, we are putting this down to them not being able to access the bins, and being put off by the coffee grounds, either way its good news.
• Cost savings to café – we are still quantifying the cost savings but are anticipating that once the seat is in full swing garbage collection costs will be reduced, and despite the extreme wet weather this year we are now starting to harvest mint, parsley and salad greens in the garden, whilst we are not producing enough for the café needs it is certainly saving around $20 a week at the moment. This should increase with more garden space becoming available.
• Spreading the word, the community interest and support is definitely there, we need to embrace this.
Karen Booth