Green living
AUCKLAND PARK- Discerning restaurants in the Johannesburg area are recycling more than their glass and plastics.
A local resident has coined a positive recycling project that focuses on recycling food waste from restaurants into community projects.
Jacques Damhuis, the brain behind the project had one aim – to help people grow food in disadvantaged areas. After a lifetime of gardening for pleasure from age three, Damhuis gave up his corporate job to follow his passion in 2010.
“The process was more involved than merely teaching, because there had to be a holistic approach to the model, and it had to start with growing the people who would be involved, and including only positive outcomes in the process,” he says.
Numerous areas to the project have been established.
“The social upliftment area is our main focus, but in order to survive while helping community projects, GRO4U was established to bring in an income by creating and managing suburban vegetable gardens,
Also needed were good composting and fertilising products, which are costly and unhelpful to struggling communities” comments Damhuis.
Research and networking led Damhuis to the Bokashi system – invented in 1980 by a Japanese soil scientist Professor Teruo Higa, and so Positive Recycle came into being.
“Statistics claim 30 per cent of our food is wasted, and that this wasted food ends up on landfills where it lets off methane as it rots. But treating food waste with bran impregnated, effective micro-organisms in Bokashi bins, we can turn this foul-smelling, potentially toxic, pest-attracting waste into nutrient-rich soil food,” he says.
“We accelerate the breaking-down process without attracting pests, and we can do it more cost-effectively than conventional collections,” adds Damhuis with enthusiasm.
The Positive Recycle team is now 14 people strong.
“We have been delivering most of the food waste to Hlubuko Co-operative in Tinasoke near Thokoza where it is being turned into compost for a project called Grow-a-Farmer. Some has gone to Nqubela Primary in Thokoza and is being processed,” he adds
“We also sell excess produce from the community gardens (for their use) and also our choice of useful gardening tools, seeds and general supplies to help boost income. Sponsors and benefactors can also use the Veggiebank wish-lists to make donations to our community projects, he says.
Residents can also be part of the clean, pest-free food waste recycling revolution by contacting Netanya at Veggiebank to start their 20- or 25-litre Bokashi buckets.
