Making landfill into organic goodness – Update
Some ups and downs – but with a happy ending.
I just wanted to give you a couple of updates on how our ‘food waste recycling program’ has been going. Some may recall one of our blogs from 2021 where we told you about one of our biggest ‘Eco endeavours’ – where we purchased a food waste dehydrator and the impact it has had on how we handle one of the big waste issues a business like ours has to deal with.
So where’s it all going these days?
The first update is what we do with the end product from the dehydration process. We installed the machine in 2020 and for the first couple of years a local flower grower took all the food waste and used it in their garden beds. However, after a couple of years they had accumulated all the product they could use. With the dehydrated food waste building up at home I decided to start bagging up the product and placing it in the shop for customers to take home ‘free of charge’ to use in their gardens.
We reached out to our super talented graphic designer Kylie from ‘To the Point Productions’ to create some signage to let our customers know what we were doing – and within days of having the poster in place the dehydrated food waste was walking out the door! (Okay, literally speaking it was being walked out the door but you get the gist!)
Every day we generate three or four bags of the material and every day it disappears. Some times it sits there for hours, but other times it’s gone in minutes – but it always goes and this has been happening for about two years now. The big thing about this program is the way customers keep coming back for the material and also tell their friends about it’s benefits so in a way it has been self perpetuating and has required no further effort on our behalf other than creating the material in the first place.
That time our machine broke – OMG!
The second bit of an update centers on a bit of a mishap with the machine where we snapped a driveshaft and the machine was in operable for almost three months. Like most companies nowadays, the supplier of the machine didn’t have the replacement parts in stock – so not only did we have to wait for them to come from Korea, we also had to wait for the parts to be made first and then sent! To the company’s credit, they could see from the images we supplied that the broken stainless steel shaft had a casting fault that had created a bit of a weakness – so they generously sent us the replacement parts free of charge even though we were well outside the warranty period.
It was a bit of a shock when I opened the box of parts and realised what a huge task lay ahead. Due to the massive stress loads that the machine goes through with each cycle, the shaft is not something that is just inserted and then bolted in The shaft is actually inserted into the chamber and then the helical components of the shaft are welded in place within the the confined space of the cooking chamber. To give some perspective, the chamber is about the same volume as a large laundry sink but deeper with a narrower opening. It was going to take a very talented and patient engineer to fix this.
Someone pleeeese rescue us!!
After being rejected by every local welder I contacted, I had to expand my search. I finally received a positive response from a mobile welder in southwest Sydney. Andy from ABM engineering spent two full days cutting out the broken mechanism and then meticulously assembling and fitting the components to form the new drive shaft and helical mechanism that mash and churn the food waste in the chamber, pulverising it under high heat and constant airflow until all the moisture has been extracted.
Despite never having seen a machine like this, let alone having no experience of working on one, Andy was able to complete the repair and gain enough of an understanding about the machine’s operation to be able to do everything else required – like replacing the seals and setting up the other drive components and sensors, etc.
When he left the machine was literally working as good as new. Legend!!
Let’s hope that never happens again!
The three months we spent without the machine were a real eye opener for us.
We had become so accustomed to handling our food waste responsibly and suddenly we had all this material going into landfill.
To make things worse, it was now costing us an extra $100-$150 per week to get rid of all this material that had previously been treated as a valuable commodity.
It was heartbreaking and frustrating watching all this material go to waste, but at least it made us stop and appreciate the value of the machine and the contribution it makes to not only to our business and its bottom line, but also to the community that utilised the material and (more broadly), the environment – in not having to deal with the hundreds of tonnes of food waste that we (and every other business like ours) generate.
At least there was a happy ending – all’s now well, and fingers crossed it does not break again!
