Closing the loop

A partnership between Sesame Lane Care and Kindergarten and a Beachmere-based business is turning food waste into compost, soil and worm castings.

Sesame Lane and In the Loop BNE have forged a new food partnership following a successful trial at Clontarf that ran for a year from June 2020. Since then, Sesame Lane has been rolling out the initiative across all its centres to reduce food waste to zero.

Mitch Langfield from In the Loop BNE explains how it works.

“The whole process is called a closed loop system. It’s where the food waste gets produced, I collect it, it gets turned back into compost, the compost is then used to grow food and then goes back into the kitchen. So, nothing actually needs to be wasted and you’re continually building nutrient density in whatever garden you’re getting your food from,” he says.

Sesame Lane Food Services Co-ordinator Tiffany Turner says partnering with Mitch to make better use of food scraps from Sesame Lane’s 14 centres makes sense.

“We cook over 5000 meals every week at Sesame Lane and that produces quite a lot of food scraps in that process,” she says.

“Our goal for 2023 is to have zero food scraps going into landfill.

“Each day, our chefs provide each classroom with a small rubbish bin for food scraps. They come back to the kitchen and then they are simply placed into a larger bin and at the end of each day, our chef takes all the food scraps to a main bin for Mitch to collect at the end of each week.

“Six short weeks later, Mitch brings back beautiful soil for us bursting with nutrients for the children to grow their vegetables and their herbs which supports our Owlbert Garden Program.”

Tiffany says it is a complete loop to create a healthier environment.

“The kids get really excited and know their scraps have been turned into soil which is used to grow fruit and vegetables and flowers,” she says.

It’s an important piece of the puzzle for Mitch, who is passionate about community education on how to reduce food waste and improve soil quality.

He has refined the process along the way, experimenting with different methods to determine which work best.

And Mitch loves that the zero food waste message will flow from children to their parents as a result of his partnership with Sesame Lane.

• Rotting food produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

• Across Australia, one in three kilograms of food produced is wasted.

• Australians throw out up to 20 per cent of the food they buy.

• Between 20 and 40 per cent of fruit and vegetables are rejected before they reach supermarket shelves.

Recovering in hospital from a lifethreatening illness sowed the seed for Brooke Mitchell to become a nurse, and she couldn't be happier.

"Staying in the hospital was a blessing in disguise, as I experienced how nurses help patients recover and rehabilitate both physically and mentally after a traumatic event," Brooke says.

"I was in a coma. I had died a few times and then moved to the burns unit where I had to rehab - learning to walk and eat again."

Blown away by the nurses' professionalism and how they gave her peace of mind when she was in such a vulnerable state, she decided it was the career for her.

"Seeing nursing from the patient side left me wanting to make a difference and help people in vulnerable positions like I was," Brooke says.

After making a full recovery, Brooke returned to work in her role in airline operations, only for the pandemic to bring her aviation career to an abrupt end.

"Working for almost 20 years in the airline industry gave me a wealth of experience and opportunity. But when the pandemic hit, I decided to change careers entirely," Brooke explains.

"When asking myself 'what do I want to do?', the answer was obvious, and nursing was my calling. The care,