Turn Food Waste into Resource and WIN an Earth Bokashi Recycling Kit

Words: Crush

Recipe? Selected. Knives? Sharpened. Cutting boards? Cleaned. Pots? Ready. Oven? Heating. Ingredients? Measured. Food waste? Sorted with Earth Bokashi.

Turning Food Waste to Food Resource

Most good cooks will use off-cuts and chicken carcasses to make a delicious stock, repurpose left-over grilled vegetables into a soup or a pie or turn fish bones and prawn shells into a delicious bisque. But once the stock and bisque have been drained what happens with what’s left in the colander? What about that expired bottle of mystery sauce forgotten on the bottom shelf of your fridge? Or the now fluffy cheese rind in a buried Tupperware? What about the heaps of egg shells after a Saturday brunch?

bokashi - turn food waste into compostNo matter how conscious we are of food waste, we all generate some. Usually, it goes straight into the rubbish bin and then dumped in a landfill. But what if we reframed our view of food scraps from “waste” to “resource”?

The Value of Food Waste

The negative value is 627kg/tonne CO2e emissions when it is dumped. This calculation excludes energy and the cost of moving it to a landfill, never mind the smell it creates or the vermin it attracts.

bokashi compostingIf we take the view that food absorbs nutrients in order to grow, then logically, the positive value of food waste is that it contains all the organic matter and nutrients healthy soil needs.

The challenge, however, is that it is not always easy to convert this waste into a “soil food”. Fresh vegetable and fruit peelings can be directly buried in soil or added to a worm farm, but what about the cooked food — proteins, fish bones, or the forgotten leftover lasagna.

Enter… the Bokashi Bin

One solution is to use a bokashi bin. Developed in Japan in the 1980s, bokashi means “fermented organic matter” in Japanese.

Bokashi composting is very simple:

  1. Add all food waste into a sealable bin, layer with a handful of Earth Bokashi, close the bin, repeat, and when the bin is full, seal and leave for a further two weeks to complete the fermentation process.
  2. After the two week fermentation period you can trench the food waste under soil where it will add organic matter to your soil and slowly release key micro and macro nutrients while also, importantly, boosting the microbiology of your soil.
  3. If you don’t want to trench the food waste you compost it with your garden waste, add it to a worm farm, or add to pots and mix with old potting soil.

Pro’s of This Method

You can compost all of your food waste!

All food waste can be ‘bokashi’d’ including cooked and uncooked meat, sea food, small bones, dairy, onions, etc.

It’s easy on the nose!

Bokashi ferments food waste so that it doesn’t smell rotten. Instead it has a similar smell to beer or cider.

It’s so easy!

Using a bokashi bin is really easy.  Add food waste into the bin.  Add Earth Bokashi microbe mix.  Close the lid. And you’re done!

So whether you’re baking, frying, grilling, chopping, dicing or slicing you should also be composting using an Earth Bokashi food waste recycling kit.

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