Community solutions for food waste

Kaicycle Composting is a subscription-based community composting enterprise which processes 40 tonnes of household and office food waste in Wellington each year. Since it started operating in 2015, Kaicycle Composting has processed an estimated 230 tonnes of food scraps, in addition to arborist waste, coffee chaff, and untreated wood shavings. The resulting compost is used at the Kaicycle Urban Farm in Newtown, and any extra is donated to City Housing and local community gardens. Kaicycle Urban Farm produces fresh vegetables for the local community, with people able to buy a share in the outputs of the farm.

Kaicycle currently uses composting boxes in Newtown and is at capacity, but a new site in Rongotai and an in-vessel composter, which fully contains and automatically stirs compost, will enable Kaicycle to process an additional 90 tonnes of food scraps per year. As capacity grows, Kaicycle will look to sell surplus compost to supplement its income from the urban farm and scraps collections.

Kaicycle collects food scraps from around 200 offices and households, including from groups in multi-unit dwellings where home-based solutions for food scraps are often limited. Collections are done by e-bike, reducing transport-related emissions from Kaicycle’s activities. In addition, about 65 household subscribers drop scraps off at three sites across the city.

Aerial view of the Kaicycle urban farm in Newtown, Wellington. Image credit: Te Kawa Robb, Toroa Creative.

Compost manager Kate Walmsley building a compost pile with collected food scraps.

Liam and Tom, former Kaicycle staff members, collecting food scraps by e-bike in Wellington’s CBD.

Kaicycle uses scales to measure the ratio of nitrogen-rich food waste to carbon-rich garden waste, coffee chaff to regulate water content, and thermometers to ensure compost piles reach at least 55°C so that harmful microbes and seeds are killed. Compost nutrition and contamination testing at Eurofins and Hill Laboratories helped Kaicycle improve its processes when it was getting started, and it intends to do more testing this year to continuously improve its product.

The voluntary compost standard in Aotearoa (NZS 4454) focuses on the chemical composition of compost rather than its biological health (other than a limit on the presence of E. coli, a pathogen), but Kaicycle is keen to understand the diversity and relative levels of beneficial microbes in its compost too, which the standard acknowledges is important for the release of nutrients but doesn’t provide a methodology for. Labs like Soil Foodweb New Zealand which analyse the microbial health of compost and soils are scarce.

Kaicycle works to ensure its subscribers know what to include in their scrap bins. It recently undertook an education campaign explaining why it doesn’t accept any compostable packaging, highlighting that compostable packaging embeds the linear economy and risks introducing contaminants while bringing little to no nutritional value to the compost.

While well-managed compost piles mean odour and pest risks are minimised, Kaicycle works with Predator Free Wellington to support trapping efforts and the wider predator free kaupapa.

Kaicycle employs the equivalent of 4.5 fulltime staff, split across fulltime and parttime roles in the composting, farm, and community engagement arms of the enterprise. Kaicycle also provides many education and community engagement opportunities through public volunteer sessions, community events, workshops, and an urban farm school. The urban farm school is delivered with education provider Papa Taiao Earthcare. In 2023, the urban farm school will have more than 25 local high school students attending a year-long, NCEA accredited programme. In the last year Kaicycle has hosted 125 volunteers at the farm.

Kaicycle hosting local community members at a farm open day with pumpkin soup made from farm pumpkins.
Open days usually include workshops, seedling sales, shared kai, live music, and farm tours.

While all composting leads to some greenhouse gas emissions (albeit substantially less than emissions from landfilling food waste), Kaicycle works to keep methane emissions to a minimum by managing the composition of its compost piles, turning them regularly to ensure they are oxygenated, and inoculating piles with Beneficial Anaerobic Microbes (BAM) like those used in bokashi. BAM contains facultative anaerobes which can continue to break down food scraps in the absence of oxygen without producing methane, with the intention being that if the pile becomes anaerobic, methane-producing bacteria won’t dominate. Using BAM reduces the frequency with which the compost piles must be turned, reducing labour and allowing beneficial fungal networks to develop with less disruption.

As with many district plans, the Wellington District Plan is ambiguous about the legal status of community gardens, urban farms, and community composting. Wellington’s plan is currently being updated and looks to include composting at community gardens as an expected and permitted activity. Kaicycle hopes to see community composting directly included as well, to clarify the status of and rules associated with small- and mid-scale composting enterprises.

Kaicycle is currently undergoing a three-year process to attain Hua Parakore verification for its operations. The Hua Parakore verification scheme is a kaupapa-based approach to organics certification developed by Te Waka Kai Ora, the Māori Organics Authority. Participating organisations must demonstrate how they embed the kaupapa of whakapapa, wairua, mana, māramatanga, te ao tūroa, and mauri in their mahi.