- Composting essentially means to recycle your food scraps and other biodegradables, into another useful resource: compost for your soil and plants.
- Because food waste is recyclable into compost, there is no reason why this should go to our full, expensive and toxic landfills. Furthermore, local governments like the Western Cape have imposed a Landfill ban for food waste from 2022. Read more
How do we set up a Composting program at the office?
An easy way of diverting your food waste from landfills is to set up a composting program at your home and office. And an easy way to implement a composting program is to use BOKASHI.
Bokashi is a wheat bran, brewed with a combination of naturally occurring beneficial bacteria, yeasts and fungi. It looks a bit like saw-dust, and manages food waste via an anaerobic fermentation system (i.e. fermentation without any oxygen/air). In other words, using an air-tight container, the Bokashi will compost your food waste via fermentation, and will ensure there are no bad odours!
However, the fermentation process does take a little while (as it does in nature!). Hence, in your office, on week 3 of a full Bokashi bin (which is what we call a bin full of food scraps and Bokashi bran), the content in your Bokashi bin would need to be handled in one of the following ways:
1) If your property allows this, feed the content to a worm farm, or compost it in a garden composter; or
2) A service collector collects your full bins, provide you with new empty ones, and take your Food scraps to a licensed composting facility, where this will be composted.
How many Bokashi Bins and how much Bokashi Bran will I need?
Depending on your company size and amount of food waste generated, you can work on:
0.04 Kg of Bokashi bran per 1 Kg of Food waste generated. Hence, if you have approximately 25 Kgs of food waste per week, you would need 1Kg of Bokashi bran, per week. Food storage bins come in 25L bins, 85L bins and 100L drums; and those can be bought from Postwink.
Postwink also stocks pretty, counter-top options for food collection that your staff can use in office kitchens – these improve participation, whilst ensuring your kitchens remain looking good!
Who collects my full Bokashi Bins from me?
There are composting collectors who will collect from offices at a small fee. If you are Cape Town-based, Postwink will arrange this for you as well.
The good news is because the Bokashi starts the composting process within the airtight bins, collections doesn’t need to happen that regularly. If you generate a lot of food waste, you may request weekly collections – but if you have the space to store the drums/bins, you could even request a monthly collection!
Would you like more information on this unique way of recycling your office food waste? Email Berenice : info@postwink.co.za
