ISF researchers are inspiring others to take a chance on cutting-edge approaches to managing food waste – including a maggot farm at Sydney’s largest redevelopment project.
Deep in the basement below the Barangaroo development in Sydney’s CBD sits a blue shipping container. It seems unremarkable, but it’s what’s inside that makes it noteworthy: 75 million squirming maggots.
While this may sound like the stuff of Orwellian nightmares to some, those little grubs are, in reality, working miracles. They’re capable of munching through five tonnes of food waste a day – more than the entire output from the 22-hectare public, commercial and residential Barangaroo precinct.
These black soldier fly larvae turn the food waste into fertiliser. And in a perfectly circular and sustainable ecosystem, once the maggots have consumed the waste they in turn become high-protein, high-fat feed for chickens or fish.
Underneath Barangaroo is a system that recycles around 60 tonnes of food waste each month
Maggots eat the food waste turning it into fertiliser
The maggots never turn into flies and there’s no odour from the container (measuring 8 by 3 by 3 metres), although the fertiliser, known as frass, has a "lovely, earthy smell", according to Lucy Sharman, the sustainability manager at Lendlease, the company developing Barangaroo.
Every 12 days the farm is emptied and restocked
The fertiliser and maggots are currently sent back to Goterra, the creator of the technology, in the ACT, but the ultimate aim for the Barangaroo maggot farm, now in a six-month pilot trial, is for the output to be used onsite, creating a circular ecosystem within the precinct.
Having a unit like ISF that is specifically focused on research related to climate change is incredibly important to industry.
Lucy Sharman, Lendlease
"If the trial’s successful, and so far it looks like it will be," Lucy Sharman says, "we’ll look at how much fertiliser we can use with our own landscaping, and I’d like to have chickens or a fish farm on site, and feed the maggots to the fish and have the fish used in the restaurants and then the waste comes back down again and we close that loop."
The Barangaroo trial is just one initiative that can trace its genesis back to the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) and its ground-breaking work on waste management, led by Associate Professor Dena Fam.
And it’s those connections across the city, NSW and, potentially, the country that excite Fam, a former research director at ISF, which is based at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). "The momentum of work just builds on itself," she says.
Organisations and individuals who deal with waste have the opportunity to be exposed to the most innovative and cutting-edge approaches to managing waste globally and to understand the value of doing things differently.
— Dena Fam, Institute for Sustainable Futures
Back in 2016, Fam and her team, in collaboration with the City of Sydney, Sydney Water and the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA), began a scoping study that looked at global innovations in organic waste management to see what could be done in Australia’s densest urban area, the Pyrmont-Ultimo precinct (PUP) in inner Sydney.
The Pyrmont-Ultimo Precinct Scale Organics Management study, completed in late 2017, identified enormous potential for food and other organic waste to be 'mined' for reuse, a valuable prospect considering Australians send 4 million tonnes of food to landfill each year. Almost half of household refuse destined for NSW landfills is food and garden waste.
The team examined the layers of urban organics – domestic food waste, grease from cafes and restaurants, wastewater in sewers – then mapped potential solutions, including for the award-winning Central Park development, a densely packed area with more than 600 apartments and over 50 retail spaces, including 20-plus food establishments.
Building on the PUP study came the Central Park Precinct Organics Management Feasibility Study, which looked at managing organic waste streams with anaerobic digestion, a process that converts waste to methane gas for energy use.
In addition, in parallel with the PUP study, UTS installed two dehydrators on its campus to deal with the five tonnes a month of organic waste from student and staff kitchens and campus cafes, significantly reducing the amount going to landfill.
Understanding the organic waste volumes involved in a building, campus, precinct, city or beyond is crucial to deciding which waste management system to use, and that’s where ISF’s research and data is so important. "There’s no one size that fits all," says Fam.
A major value from the UTS waste collection effort is in the flow-on effects – influencing the broader community to manage organic waste streams more sustainably and therefore diverting food waste from landfill.
Dena Fam says that for a number of reasons, including the COVID pandemic, plans to install the anaerobic digestion system at Central Park have not gone ahead.
Pandemic-related restrictions on multiple handling of food waste have also created difficulties with disposing of the output from the UTS dehydrators, which was originally going to a garlic farm near Lithgow.
But there’s still plenty going on and A/Prof Fam is enthusiastic about the initiatives that have sprung from her research, and particularly from the Organix19 conference hosted by ISF in partnership with the EPA and sponsored by Sydney Water.
The two-day summit in May 2019 brought together 65 stakeholders in the generation, management, reuse, regulation and research of organics waste management in greater Sydney. It was at Organix19 that Lucy Sharman saw a presentation from Goterra founder Olympia Yarger and became interested in a maggot farm for Barangaroo.
"It’s about setting up these networks for people to even know what’s possible," Fam says. "The value of organising events such as Organix19 is that organisations and individuals who deal with waste have the opportunity to be exposed to the most innovative and cutting-edge approaches to managing waste globally and to understand the value of doing things differently."
Fam and ISF are also involved in a project in the Blue Mountains – Zero Waste Leura – where they are working with local businesses to avoid food waste, increase profitability and reduce environmental impact.
The first step is 12 months of auditing food waste from cafes, restaurants, hotels and other food-producing businesses to understand volumes, identify cost savings and decide on future processing systems.
Businesses have embraced the project, with the five-star Carrington Hotel already installing a composting system, which could significantly reduce its food bills.
It’s great to have a dream but to know that the ISF team… are able to provide the scientific rigour gives us lots more confidence.
— James Howarth, Leura Garage
Local café Leura Garage has installed a food dehydrator that can churn through up to 100 kilograms of food waste a week. After the initial outlay of $20,000 –half of it funded by an EPA Bin Trim grant – the dehydrator is now saving the business around $5000 a year.
Leura Garage owner James Howarth says ISF’s research provides a foundation for Blue Mountains businesses to move away from traditional methods of waste collection and disposal.
Lucy Sharman at Barangaroo concurs: "Having a unit like ISF that is specifically focused on research related to climate change is incredibly important to industry. It provides us with verifiable, solid, reliable data that allows people who are working in other industries to make good, thoughtful decisions about actions that will actually improve our response to climate change."
Learn about how food waste is treated ‘like gold’ at UTS as part of an award-winning circular economy project led by ISF researchers.
Michelle Zeibots: The Hartley Vale Good Garlic Company is located at a farm called the Refinery near Lithgow. At my farm we produce organically grown garlic using compost that's been made from coffee grounds and food waste from UTS.
The circular economy is a process that uses waste from one part of the system and then uses that waste to produce something new at another point in the system… and that's what we do with the compost that we use to fertilise our soils that helps us to grow delicious and very healthy food.
Dena Fam: The collaboration really crosses teaching and learning and research, but also operations, communications. We had really good engagement with the communications teams at UTS that were actually involved in developing comms based on the workshops and research we did on this project.
The Living Lab is really about getting students to intimately experience a system and have the opportunity to intervene somewhere or influence how that system changes improve in the sense of having a really operational circular economy.
Ian McInnes: Our cleaners are instrumental in collecting the food waste around UTS. They sort through the food waste to remove any impurities and prepare it for the food dehydrator. After 24 hours the food waste is removed from the machine and is now classed as soil conditioner and is taken to be used at the garlic farm.
Dena Fam: We really need to work collaboratively to be able to operationalise a circular economy in practice, and what UTS is trying to do is complete the cycle, from the production of food waste, the processing of food waste, right through to the reuse of food waste as a resource in farming.
And UTS is a pilot for something much bigger. We have the opportunity to do that at a much bigger scale – a city-scale, a precinct-scale.
ENDS/
Researchers
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Dena Fam -
Research Director
PROJECT | 2020-2021
Zero Waste Leura
By focusing on food waste avoidance, Blue Mountains hospitality businesses can reduce organic waste generation and therefore minimise the environmental impact and cost of organic waste disposal.
