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Composting is on the up!

Zero to Landfill – by Melanie Jones

We at Zero to Landfill hate waste ending up in landfills so we’ve decided to do something about it. Starting with organics – food waste, contaminated paper and garden refuse – we hope to make a big dent in waste going to landfill. Over 50% of waste in landfills is biodegradable and busy producing methane gas as we speak, so it makes sense to compost the waste before it reaches the landfill. Our organic division, ZTL Organics, has imported an in-vessel composting system from America and we are currently running trials composting food waste near Stellenbosch. The system is especially suited to composting food waste which is not easily composted under normal conditions. The trial is three weeks old and already the compost is looking good.

All the kinks will be ironed out in the next month or so and we’ll be ready to offer a food waste composting service to businesses in early 2009. We hope that the City of Cape Town will also like the idea of composting food waste and offer the service to households in Cape Town. In the meantime, please compost as much as you can at home. Once the organics are taken care of we’ll move on to the other waste streams – paper, plastic, glass and metals – finding new, innovative ways of keeping them out of the landfills and useful.

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