"The greatest waste is a wasted opportunity"
As part of our Open Sauce project, over the last few months, Cultivating Community, MAKE Studios and STREAT have been conducting a deep dive into our collective’s waste streams. This took the form of eight interviews with key partners, as well as waste audits with a subset of these organisations. Our interviews were particularly important given waste audits coincided with lockdowns where all sites had greatly-diminished waste streams compared to non-covid times.
Below is a table that extrapolates what the annual figure for our waste, if captured data remained static all year.
However, we foresee the realistic figures are likely to be between 2 – 4 times greater post-lockdown, than data captured during the recent waste audits. The team will progressively be conducting future audits as operations ramp up and these figures will be updated.
A new partner who has recently joined the Open Sauce project is already conducting regular self-audits, focused primarily on their food waste stream. In the new year, when organisations have returned to full operational capacity, we will recommence with a deeper investigation using physical waste audits at each of our partner sites involved in Open Sauce.
In addition to the audits, STREAT, in partnership with MAKE Studios, conducted in-depth interviews with staff from eight Moving Feast partner sites. These interviews were of particular importance because they provided a holistic view into the “how” and “why” of not only the waste streams but also each organisation's resource management systems and procedures.
The interviews provided rich insights into how we might optimise our value chains and extract the most value out of precious food resources that are successfully diverted from landfill (e.g. put into compost), but could be utilised in higher value ways (e.g. retail products).
Some key themes explored during the interviews include:
Formal waste procedures and policies.
Barriers that may impact resources being taken higher up the value chain.
Systems that could improve operational capacity and processes.
How partners manage seasonal and unexpected gluts .
The capabilities, assets and resources unique to each partner.
The forecasting and ordering methods used.
We are excited to share the insights uncovered from our research to-date in a series of blog posts about Open Sauce in the coming months.
This project is supported by the Victorian Government’s Recycling Victoria Innovation Fund as part of the Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre (CEBIC).