Farmers turn restaurant food scraps into 'very valuable commodities'

While diners are enjoying their evening seaside meals, Andrew Collins is happily outside chasing the scraps.

Cruising the streets of Newcastle, Mr Collins picks up more than 20 tonnes of food waste each week from more than 70 businesses he partners with.

It started with a few buckets in the back of utes, but there is now a network of bins he supplies to hospitality venues and collects seven days a week, turning their trash into farming treasure.

"Coffee grinds, waste fish, the oyster shells — it's a very diverse city that has every type of cuisine that all gets mixed together," he said.

"We're not waste collectors, we collect feed stocks."

Those feed stocks are for his worm and soil farm near Scone, in the NSW Upper Hunter.

But the worm diet is not just a mix of food scraps. It is complemented by something the nation's horse capital, Scone, is rich in: horse poo.

Mr Collins and business partner Toby Smith juggle the evening city bin runs with the morning manure pick-up.

"It's a perfect match because the food waste is very high in nitrogen and the stable waste is very high in carbon and it just makes the best compost," Mr Collins said.

'Barely scratching the surface'

More than 7.6 million tonnes of food is wasted each year in Australia, which charity Foodbank said was enough to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground nine times.

In a bid to reduce that, and help NSW meet broader net zero targets, new food waste rules have just come in.

The Newcastle venues already supplying to Circular Organics, the outfit run by Mr Collins and Mr Smith, are ahead of the curve, with a statewide mandate to stop food waste from entering landfill ramping up.

From July 1, businesses that sell or handle food now have to start separating their waste under the NSW government's mandate for Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) recycling, to stop food scraps going to landfill.

Depending on weekly bin volume, businesses will need to comply in a staged approach, to all be on board by July 2030.

Many councils across NSW have already starting rolling out the FOGO service to households — that deadline is also July 2030.

Mr Collins said he was "surprised by just how broken the food system is".

"It's even more surprising what two farmers from Scone can actually achieve and the amount of food scraps that we can collect just out of this one city, and we're barely scratching the surface," he said.

They are taking more than 1,000 tonnes of waste out of the equation each year, but know they are only a small player.

"There is so much waste. It's an uncontrolled problem that no-one really has a solution for," Mr Collins said.

"But they're very valuable commodities in agriculture to create fertilisers and it's really opened my eyes to how much goes to waste in Newcastle."

Sitting in the truck with Mr Collins, I can't help but ask how he handles the smell of food scraps.

"A more balanced bin isn't that offensive … but sometimes you can taste that fish," he laughed.

From bin to brew

While Mr Collins sees himself as "the compost guy", Mr Smith looks after the worms that give the bin scraps a new lease on life.

Looking out over neat rows of food scraps, sawdust and horse manure, he explains the process.

"First it goes into the compost piles where it breaks down through that system, so roughly 1 tonne of that compost will break down by at least half," he said.

Mr Collins explained the compost went through multiple heat cycles, which was part of meeting the Australian standards.

"To kill your weeds and seeds and pathogens you need to hold it at over 60 degrees [Celsius] for five heat cycles," he said.

A machine drives over the neat rows, mixing the compost, while thermometers monitor the temperature and moisture levels.

"There is a fair bit of science in it, but it's honestly just Mother Nature doing what Mother Nature does and that's the beauty of what we do, we're just working with her."

Within about four months, the waste products have broken down into rich compost, which can be sold or used in the worm farms, alongside more food waste.

After dropping in volume from 1 tonne to about half that, the worms work their magic.

"From that we can feed it through the worm farms and that can break essentially that 1 tonne that came in, down to 100-200 kilos," Mr Smith said.

"Through the process of going through the worms, they produce all the essential microbes and nutrients by processing it through their guts and they give off certain types of nutrients through their skin, and essentially it just turns into a worm casting product."

The team started with 12 worm pods but have grown now to 52.

The pods have all been repurposed from their original uses and are connected using old stormwater pipes.

The final piece in the fertiliser puzzle is to turn the worm poo, or castings, into liquid.

Mr Smith said they did that by recirculating worm tea through a tank and watering system to increase its strength.

"[The water] leaches through the worm castings, drips down through a screen type filter, which falls into the sump of the pod, that then runs through some stormwater drain … and it runs back into the same tank and we just keep recirculating," he said.

"Therefore we're not using much water, but the beauty of it is that we can get a really high concentrate fertiliser at the end of it.

"As far as going to a greener future, with the price of fertiliser this is just the best way to do it as far as soil health, keeping it natural, organic.

"It all comes down to healthy soil, healthy humans, healthy community."

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