By Marnie Birch
For 10 years, Mitch Langfield was a professional sportsman, travelling the world riding wakeboards in competitions and performing in films. A series of knee reconstructions caused him to reassess his career and Mitch created a closed-loop food recycling system called In the Loop BNE. It diverts food waste from landfill and transforms it into organic garden products, using innovative composting and vermiculture (worm farming) techniques.
After initially purchasing a Beachmere property with wakeboarding in mind, Mitch focused on improving the sandy soil intent on growing fruit and vegetables. When he discovered the importance of compost and worm farming for soil regeneration, he quit his day job to set up a composting business.
“Everything I read led me back to worm farming. If you have worms, you have healthy soil,” he explains.
For Mitch to farm worms on a large scale, he said he needed “massive amounts of organic matter”. He had seen residential bucket collections of food waste operating in America, but no one was doing that in Australia. That’s when he established In the Loop BNE and partnered with Sesame Lane Child Care Centres.
Mitch collects food scraps from 5000 meals that are produced daily in the childcare kitchens. Waste that would typically be disposed of in landfill. Once collected, the waste is composted and then fed to worms. There is zero waste and the end composted product is returned to the gardens to enrich the soil. The recycling loop is complete when a second food crop is grown in the enriched garden.
According to Mitch, certain farming practices may deplete the soil and rob plants of valuable nutrients, whereas a closed-loop system retains the nutrients within the soil. This means there is less need for supplementation of crops with fertilisers. He insists plants grown in this way are generally healthier and more resistant to disease adding that the produce is also “packed full of nutrients”.
Fourteen childcare centres, as well as various cafes and households from Bribie Island to Wavell Heights, currently participate in collections with In the Loop BNE.
“We trialled using In the Loop BNE's food recycling system and it was so easy to use we signed up all of our childcare centres and now report zero food waste going to landfill,” Sesame Lane Child Care Centre marketing co-ordinator Tanya Ricketts said.
With waste disposal an ever-increasing problem for society, a closed-loop recycling system has the potential to benefit the environment by reducing methane emissions, a known greenhouse gas, from landfill sites. Over the two years In the Loop BNE has been operating, Mitch said he had recycled more than 70 tonnes of food waste that would otherwise have been sent to landfill.
The process Mitch uses at his Beachmere property involves an initial hot composting phase, where various components are carefully balanced and turned to ensure the temperature remains ideal for aerobic decomposition to occur.
After two weeks of fermentation, the waste is moved to a curing pile where further decomposition occurs. The structure of the mix itself has completely changed six weeks in. Food scraps are no longer discernible, although plastic fruit stickers persist and require removal as they do not biodegrade. Larger woodchips are separated out at this point and sold as a nutrient-heavy mulch with significant water-retentive capabilities.
“It acts like a slow-release fertiliser,” Mitch said. “Anything that I have put that on has grown like crazy.”
Next, it’s the worm’s turn to process the compost. Onsite Mitch has 26 worm-farm bins with about 20,000 Red Wriggler worms in each. The worm castings are sold online at the Beachmere markets or used to brew a special compost ‘tea’. Full of beneficial microbes, Mitch said the compost ‘tea’ could be sprayed onto a plant’s leaves, boosting nutrient levels and deterring pests like sooty mould.
Mitch confesses it was a steep learning curve to establish the business, mainly because it’s such a new concept. Admitting to many hours of research and hard work to manage the system’s complexities. He believes society can still achieve zero waste, cautioning that doing it right without contamination, is a different matter.
“We have a long way to go educating people before they care,” he said. “You have to find what they care about to make them care, I think. Everything we do has another effect down the road.”
As the successful pioneer of closed-loop food recycling systems, Mitch is keen to educate others in the future by offering workshops on farming worms and compost techniques. In speaking with children in the childcare centres about composting and worms, he has already begun to educate the next generation.
For further food waste collection information, contact Mitch Langfield on 0434 496 995, at intheloopbne.com.au or via Facebook.
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