Composting Food Waste with Earth Probiotic

Food waste sent to landfill is not only a huge waste of a potentially valuable resource but it also causes harm to the environment. Most importantly, food waste in landfills rots, releasing harmful gasses into the atmosphere (435kgs of CO2e per ton). It also attracts pests and is unhygienic.

More and more, kitchens and events are looking to find composting solutions for food waste. Using compostable food packaging helps optimise this as food scraps can be disposed of along with the container they are in.

Earth Probiotic offer a scalable composting solution, ranging from domestic solutions to big events (like Grahamstown Festival) and commercial kitchens that want to introduce recycling into their operations. All wet waste, including cooked food scraps, meat, bones, dairy, citrus and seafood can be dealt with using the Bokashi system. The probiotics help to rapidly decrease decomposition time, so a heap that is well established will take 8 weeks from beginning till its ready to use.

We recommend you soak / shred the bagasse food packaging for home composting using Bokashi.

We count thirty benefits of kitchen composting:

Health and safety:

1. Improved environmental hygiene in facility particularly kitchen and waste area
2. Reduction of flies
3. Reduction of pests and rodents
4. Reduction of odours
5. Reduction of disease causing bacteria

Environment/Social:

1. CO2e savings (435kg CO2e /ton recycled)
2. Reduce waste to landfill
3. 32% increase in dry recyclables through separation at source – less contamination of waste.
4. Reduction in water resource contamination.
5. Reduction in spread of disease causing bacteria
6. Accurate waste figures for waste reporting
7. Reduced CO2 taxes (as of 2015)
8. Opportunity to convert waste stream into resource
9. Skills and enterprise development
10. Food security
11. Improved environmental health
12. Reduces potential to recook and resell food from landfill sites into informal settlements.

Other reductions:

1. Food wastage and shrinkage
2. Bin bag usage
3. Frequency of waste collections
4. Wheelie bins
5. Leaky garbage bags

Soil/plants:

1. Adds beneficial micro organisms
2. Adds minerals and nutrients
3. Improves plant and soil health
4. Protect plants from diseases
5. Increases water retention
6. Improves crop yields
7. Continuous supply of chemical free compost (if composted on site)
8. Opportunity to plant own food gardens to create closed loop value chain from kitchen to compost back to kitchen.

The Bokashi Fermentation System

This is an all natural solution which combines Effective Micro organism Technology or “friendly bacteria” and airtight digester bins to ferment food waste. The bokashi fermentation system produces no methane gas and also eliminates harmful bacteria such as E. Coli. With bokashi (bran infused micro-organisms) you can recycle ALL food waste including cooked and uncooked meat, dairy and small bones.

The process works by layering up food waste with bokashi in the digester bins. Once full, the bin is left
to stand for two weeks. Thereafter it can be added to garden waste, trenched (or fed to wormeries).
After 6-8 weeks the recycled food waste will have broken down completely, and turned into a highly
nutritious soil food/compost.