From banana peels and bread crusts to spinach leaves that go slimy at the bottom of the packet, most households waste food.
Each year Australians waste more than seven million tonnes of food across the supply chain, costing $36.6 billion to the economy.
But a Darwin-based, Indigenous-owned-and-run enterprise is working to change that.
The waste is repurposed into a nutrient rich soil “amendment”. (ABC Alice Springs: Victoria Ellis)
Billy Feeny is the director of EcoMob, which takes food scraps and transforms them into a nutrient-rich soil amendment.
An amendment is any material added to a soil to improve potential for plant growth.
“It’s that circular economy,” he said.
“We pick the fruit, we eat the fruit, I recycle the fruit, and then the recycled fruit goes back into the ground to grow more fruit.”
Mr Feeny said 32 per cent of waste was food.
“It’s good to know that little by little we’re changing things,” he said.
Thousand of kilos saved from landfill
Although in its early days, EcoMob is currently processing about three tonnes of food waste a week — and Mr Feeny anticipates rapid growth.
“A lot of our food waste comes from the defence bases at the moment,” he said.
“We’re working with [waste disposal service] Veolia — they collect it from those messes, then they bring it to us for processing.
“Once the food waste comes in, we tip it all out of the bins, then we throw it on our sorting tables, and then we go through sorting all the [non-organic] contamination out.”
Food scraps from defence bases are taken to the warehouse for sorting. (ABC Alice Springs: Victoria Ellis)
The sorted food scraps are placed in a dehydration machine, which uses heat, air and turning paddles to break down the food into an earthy, soil-like material.
“It’s actually got a nice smell to it — it’s a little bit brothy,” Mr Feeny said.
Fertiliser or fish food
Mr Feeny said the product would be suitable for soils and helping plants grow, and researchers from the Northern Hub, a drought resilience organisation, have been analysing the organic matter to assess it’s nutritional value and which industries could make use of the product.
Regional soil coordinator Emily Hinds said the early results were promising.
“We’re going to do some more tests, and then hopefully it’ll be put into a trial on some farmland and some cropping, and then we can start to see how it benefits the soil and the crop over time,” she said.
The food scraps are dehydrated into a new material. (ABC Alice Springs: Victoria Ellis)
“We want to make sure all that’s tested and that we’ve ticked all the boxes before we use the product, but I would say we could [use it as] a soil amendment for mango crops and tree crops, maybe more so than the vegetables, just to start with.”
Ms Hinds said the soil amendment could reduce input costs for Top End farmers, who would be able to buy a local product with lower transport costs.
Mr Feeny said he was also investigating whether the product could be used as a feed for chickens, ducks, fish and prawns.
“It creates a lot of different resources from waste …well, I don’t like to call it waste — I see food waste now as a resource,”
he said.
Expansion plans
There are other companies around Australia doing similar work, but EcoMob is first in this space in the Northern Territory.
Mr Feeny hopes to eventually expand the business throughout the NT, including into remote Indigenous communities to create local employment.
Mr Feeny is the owner and director of EcoMob in Darwin. (ABC Alice Springs: Victoria Ellis)
The Northern Hub’s Troy Garling said Mr Feeny was a role model.
“Whether it’s fertiliser or whether it’s fish meal, whatever it comes out, I think for the NT that’s something to be proud of for all of us,”
he said.
