Guide to running a food waste organics / composting program

Food waste organics initiatives minimise waste by turning unwanted food into valuable and useful products, such as dehydrated food, mulch and compost.

It is important to consider all of the following steps on your path to success. For food waste organics/composting recovery initiatives, we have highlighted several key learnings that are worth further consideration. They may provide more challenges and opportunities along the way.

Download a copy of the guide

Phase one: Scope and plan

Establish a baseline community need

Learn about your landscape by understanding your:

• employees
• volunteers
• cooks
• urban farmers.

Find out their:

• knowledge of food waste
• buy-in of circular economy ideals
• attitudes and behaviours to producing food in urban settings using organic waste.

Understand where your materials are coming from and how to get them to you. Know your workers’ abilities to build compost hubs and raised garden beds. Evaluate how enthusiastic your community is about your idea.

Gain an understanding about who else in your area works in this industry and how your organisation will differentiate itself. Consider who you might collaborate with, who might help you out, and identify your strategic partners.

Plan your program

Identify your key reason for doing the work, for example it may be working towards a safe planet, equity of access to food, using finite resources wisely, or caring for self, others and the environment. Articulating what drives you will also help connect others to your vision. Then you can think about the activities that will help you achieve your greater vision.

Consider some of these activities that other programs do:

• Collect and deliver food waste and green waste from households or retail. This may include running and maintaining vehicles or running a pool of volunteer drivers.
• Run a compost hub / Bokashi / bin system to collect unwanted food waste.
• Run and maintain a food dehydrator to process green and food items.
• Package and sell processed compost, mulch, and dehydrated foodstuff.
• Run composting and gardening workshops to encourage consumption of fresh food utilising food waste.
• Harvest produce from urban farm lots to include in food relief packages and community lunches.
• Run a store or market stall to sell fresh food items.
• Collect food scraps from local cafes.
• Partner with a farmers’ market to take left overs.
• Keep poultry and chickens.
• Trial a Biodigester that creates gas.

Set your boundaries

To refine the scope of your program you’ll need to balance your capacity with community need. You should also factor in the equipment and facilities you have access to and your geographical location. Consider energy impacts of your machinery, including the power requirements and your greenhouse gas emissions. Also consider your local council’s permit requirements for the systems and building that you’re planning.

At this point, plan how you will use or distribute the compost, because these decisions will have a big impact on your program’s business model. Will you give your compost away for free or will you require a small donation? Decide if you want your compost to be certified organic. While the certification process can be expensive, you may need it if you want to sell your product at a competitive rate.

Think about what sort of arrangement would best work for you. Whether you decide to run hot compost or worm farms, you should take into account the:

• preferences of your local demographics
• visibility and accessibility of compost hubs and garden beds
• odours and aesthetics of your set up. Keep in mind that you are part of a neighbourhood environment, maybe even in a community space
• visibility and accessibility of the dining space, if community lunches are part of your plan
  
• demand and need for specific plants
• food storage space that is both usable, secure, hygienic and accessible to the workers – if you are using tubs, make sure they fit into your circular waste economy
• availability of employees, volunteers, gardeners, and cooks.

Manage risk and maintain Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs)

Assess your risks

Understand the risk profile of your intended activities and take steps to mitigate risk through:

• appropriate insurance
• disclaimers
• management processes.

Mitigation could include:

• volunteer training
• induction
• registration or certification.

Understand your agreements

MOUs are the agreements you have with your key partners such as business donors and volunteers. They are useful in establishing clarity around everyone’s roles and responsibilities to help you minimise risk and build productive partnerships.

To ensure compliance, you should make sure your staff and coordinators are aware of any contractual and MOU arrangements relating to their facilities, tools and equipment.

Design activities to change behaviours

The best practice approach is to make behaviour change as easy and convenient as possible. This could include:

• encouraging people to safely store then donate excess food products – for example, providing food waste cadies for the home and easy deposit systems at your facility
• educating the community about responsible donating to reduce unnecessary dumping of food waste through the composting process – for example, a do’s (such as fruit and vegetable scraps with their sticker removed at home) and don’ts (such as meat) list for participants
• working with retailers and manufacturers to adopt more sustainable processes to prevent end of life grocery dumping – for example, organising donation systems for charities and neighbourhood houses
• encouraging appropriate disposal of food items that your program can’t cook or donate
• changing purchasing behaviour – for example, only buying what is needed
• attending community events to increase the awareness of your services
• using education resources to promote the above – for example, workshops, posters, leaflets, websites and social media.
  
• targeting people who do not usually use kerbside recycling – for example, businesses and apartment blocks.

Try to design your engagement activities, programs and initiatives in a way that allows you to evaluate their usefulness and effectiveness in impacting behaviour change. This will also help you demonstrate your value to key stakeholders, including funders. Clarify your measures for being effective and set small goals along the way. Define what success looks like for your program. It may create other positive impacts even if it ultimately finishes.

Phase two: Implement program

Run an efficient program

This whole section is a key capability. The relationships, processes and systems established here will impact on the program’s success. Since most food waste prevention programs operate on thin margins, careful administration of resources is important.

• Create a triage system to collect, store and process waste as soon as it arrives.
• Weigh your waste going in and your compost coming out. This will help you monitor how you use it and scale your program accordingly. Don’t waste your waste! Start with small bins before going to bigger hubs.
• Make your donation criteria clear to your community and your team. Many community initiatives don’t accept donations in compostable bags.
• Remove fruit stickers from food. Some programs insist donors remove them before donating. Other programs have volunteers sifting through newly arrived material to remove them.
• If you are composting, have a source of ‘brown material’ available like dried leaves or wood shavings to absorb moisture and increase carbon content. Wood shavings work well if they are clean and if they’re readily available. But not all leaves make good brown waste, for example, plane tree and eucalyptus leaves do not break down easily.
• Decide early if you will take green waste and grass clippings. This will depend on your capacity. Many people will donate in high volumes, and this might upset the balance of materials needed for good compost.
• Drill holes to allow the compost to breathe. Don’t waste your waste! Start with small bins before going to bigger tubs.

Manage contamination and pests

Establish a monitoring system to avoid contamination as well as control rodents and pests. It takes skill to manage a healthy compost system. And contamination can cost you time, equipment and money. Vermin may be a sign that the compost needs to be turned more often.

Consider vermin mesh to minimise mess and install rodent proof compost bays.

Look after your relationships

Manage your stakeholder and corporate partners to ensure that the relationships are productive. Give people reusable containers to take away compost, for example yoghurt tubs or used coffee bags from roasters.

Clear communication will also help you improve on your systems and processes. For example, one food composting initiative found that the food waste bins they were supplying to restaurants were too cumbersome and subsequently not effective.

Involve all the people who will be impacted in the decision-making process to make sure that you’re getting the right information to build your program and enthusiastic engagement from your key stakeholders.

Engage diverse communities

Consider the most appropriate platforms for communicating about your programs and whether or not you plan to target certain groups. Different demographics in a community use different media types.

If you understand your community's demographic profile, you can improve information about food waste and leftover use so that it is accessible to groups like migrants and refugees.

Set your team up for success

Ensure that the staff and volunteers who run your program program have the appropriate training processes and can access the right manuals or resources. When engaging volunteers, have clear position descriptions that outline their:

• roles
• responsibilities
• required skills.

Think about:

• food handling regulations
• your specific insurance requirements
• what workplace safety requirements you may need for your volunteers, cooks and gardeners.

Train and employ a team to sort and load waste into compost hubs, dehydrators or mulch heaps.

Support your volunteers to contribute what they signed up for because this ensures you have the right workforce and a happy team to achieve your goals.

Have a clear plan to adapt to workforce changes and find ways to maintain your volunteers’ enthusiasm, as you may find your volunteer workforce fluctuates with the seasons.

Consider the needs of your volunteers and staff who deal with food waste and what guidance they might require. Write down a list of the key equipment and practices that will keep them safe.

This may include:

• providing your team with masks and gloves
• making sure everyone is wearing strong boots
• stretching before mixing compost
• taking breaks every 10 minutes when turning the compost.

Provide ongoing support for people who are supporting your program. Check in with them and see how are they going. You may provide intensive training to boost their skills. And for the people who use your information, offer ways for them to provide feedback.

Circular collaboration

Food waste organics/composting programs are more effective when they work together. Consider your peer organic waste/compost initiatives as a supportive and informative network that can help you achieve your shared circular goals.

Think about how you might be able to promote collaboration with each other. For example:

• help each other with consistent messaging
• share knowledge of public event opportunities
• share gardening tips, seeds, tools where appropriate
• provide local support to broader education campaigns
• share social media content that aligns with your vision.

Your program will be much stronger and more likely to achieve results if you can identify opportunities for partnership with existing organisations, such as:

• local government
• state government
• local businesses
• community centres
• neighbourhood houses.

Phase three: Evaluate and improve

Use your learnings to make improvements

Program managers do well when they think about how they might improve future practice. This might mean sharing knowledge gained with your team or debriefing with other programs and providers. It could even mean developing case studies for best practice.

When a new or unexpected donation issue arises, think about ways you can record or document the solution so that they can be repeated or applied elsewhere. Set up an easy-to-use document management system, so that everyone can all access information quickly. There are free document management systems that you can use, such as Google Drive and OneDrive.

Understand your finance and business obligations

You need people on your team who understand finance and the obligations of running a business. Complement strong business and finance knowledge with good financial systems that help you to understand quickly how your organisation is performing so that you can respond appropriately.

All programs rely on fundraising, grants and donations, so this will become an important part of your activities.

Financial viability is important to all food waste prevention programs, so think about ways you can encourage this:

• Encourage awareness of funding opportunities from philanthropic organisations and different levels of governments.
• Record data and monitor waste (by weight or volume) to communicate the value of your work. For example, show the quantity of produce saved from landfill.
• Teach your volunteers and staff to write successful applications.
• Set up ways to encourage donations.
• Put a price on waste from donors, especially corporate donors.

Demonstrate your value

By collecting data on waste avoidance you can show the value of your work to key stakeholders, such as the venue, community and funding bodies. This measuring and storytelling can help you build your community and secure funding and resources for your program.

Case study

Other circular economy initiative guides