Page 4542 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 23 November 2005
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There are better options for organic waste disposal that use no water. Rather than wasting nutrients, the rich organic matter can be collected and used in the garden—or in somebody’s garden if you do not have one yourself. There are a number of composting, fermentation and worm farm systems available, which are compact and can easily be used in individual apartments or shared between apartments on the same floor or building. Some of them look like clean little plastic boxes. They do not ooze stuff all over the place and they do not smell. I have got one of them here—a bokashi bucket. I have no conflict of interest in mentioning the bokashi bucket, except that I would like to see more people using a bokashi bucket. It can hold a month’s worth of food scraps without being emptied, and without odour.
The bokashi bucket is a unique Japanese system, which uses a thing called bokashi, which looks to me like bran or something I would feed to my chooks if I had any, to ferment food waste inside a sealed container. Because the system is sealed, there are no problems with rodents, insects or odour. The food waste is then placed in a garden. In my case, I dig a hole in the garden with a spade and chuck the food waste in. I have not checked yet to see if it has broken down into rich humus, which it is supposed to do in a couple of days, releasing nutrients to the soil. If you like, I will report back on that. Unlike composting and worm farming, there is no food waste you cannot put in the bokashi system. I guess the big problem for compost is chicken bones; you cannot really put them in the compost because that brings the rats or the cats or the foxes. But in the bokashi system you can put in those—even paper, even dairy. Because it is small and compact, it is ideal for people in units or small homes with little room in the garden—and it is very popular in inner city Melbourne. Wouldn’t we like to be like that?
Composting is a great way to take something that is a waste product and turn it into a nutrient-rich organic material. There are many composting systems available and the government could run an education program. I do not know that I have ever seen anything out in the media from this government about how people can compost. We know there was a trial in Chifley; we keep getting referred back to that.
Mrs Dunne: And it didn’t work, so they have given up the ghost.
DR FOSKEY: I cannot believe that the government even really wanted that to succeed from the way it was promoted and from the way it was quickly dismissed. Effort needs to be put into retraining people. I think people have forgotten about litter. A lot of littering goes on in this city, which indicates that people are too divorced from their rubbish; they do not take responsibility for it.
So there are compost tumblers, there are bokashi buckets and, as I have mentioned, there are issues about safety and children, though Mr Mulcahy assures me that that is not a problem. There are certainly issues about use of water. Consequently, I support Mrs Dunne’s motion. I hope that the government will, too, because I just cannot understand how a government can advocate water efficiency and allow this regulation to continue.
If the problem is with developers—if they are putting undue pressure on the government—let the government put due pressure on them to take some responsibility in thinking about more efficient organic waste disposal methods. It is about building
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