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GREEN WASTE SOLUTION AT NORTHEY STREET -
community jobs scheme sets up recycling centre

Creative imagination and innovation have produced a solution to green waste at Brisbane's Northey Street City Farm. Green Waste coordinator, Tash Morton reports...

In February 2001 Northey Street City Farm in inner-Brisbane embarked on a Community Jobs program (funded through the state government) to develop a Green Waste Recycling Centre.

The Green Waste Recycling Centre processes lawn clippings from local lawn mowing contractors, food scraps from local fruit shops and restaurants and chipped prunings from local contractors.

Trainees design innovative system

Fourteen trainees and their supervisor were employed to design, construct and invent a community model for green waste recycling. The results were fantastic!!

Five innovative human-size tumblers and seven raised worm farms were designed to handle the large volumes of waste being processed weekly.

The facility was designed to be run by a part time co-ordinator and volunteers and is built to handle 20 tonnes of green waste a year.

Scavenged materials + ingenuity

The centre was constructed using mostly scavenged materials from building sites and industrial bins.

The worm farms were built of old iron bed frames and bathtubs and the tumblers constructed from reinforcing mesh and re-used shadecloth.

The ingenuinity of the group was astounding, resulting in compost ‘good enough to eat’ in three weeks. The high quality of the compost also achieved Australian Standard for Composting AS4454.

Brisbane City Council found the project of interest and funded Northey Street City Farm to write a report on Organics Re-use for Community Groups which will appear on their website and be used to develop a series of information sheets for community groups.

Compost good enough to sell

The resulting compost and liquid fertilisers which are produced from the Centre are sold through the on-site community garden nursery, Edible Landscapes.

The nursery grows all its plants on the compost from the centre and sells a range of organic vegetable seedlings, permaculture food plants, bushtucker and fruit trees.

Lawn mowing contractors are charged a yearly registration fee to help cover the costs of managing the Green Waste Recycling Centre.

For more information on the Green Waste Recycling Centre contact the Green Waste Co-ordinator at Northey Street City Farm - Tash Morton 07 3857 8775

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PAGE UPDATED... Monday, 15 January 2007