2006 Nowaste Awards
From ANU Food Co-op Wiki
The ANU Food Cooperative today won two awards:
- Leadership in Community Groups and Associations.
- The overall 'Bronze Award' which included a $1000 prize.
A Very Special Thanks to DAN MACKINLAY who put hours and hours of work in to a great application, to everyone who helped out including Natalie Keene and Hedda Ranson-Elliott, to Trish Harrup for encouraging us to apply, and finally to everyone for setting such a great example to the the rest of the community in Waste Minimization through your Cooperative Food Shop.
Introduction
| Our application to the ACT government for the 2006 ACT NoWaste awards for waste minimisation.
The official submission guidelines are in this wiki for ease of reference for those of us who don't have micro$oft word. The base criteria for the awards are:
|
The Food Co-op is a not-for-profit co-operative, specialising is bulk purchase of healthy and environmentally conscious products for members to maximise buying power. Management and day-to-day tasks are performed largely by contributed voluntary labour and all management meetings are open to all members. There is a strong emphasis on distributed organisational expertise an learning. Prices are structured to reflect this arrangement, with members receiving a 10% discount, and a 20% discount if they have contributed a certain amount of labour towards the upkeep of the organisation. (currently 6 hours per year)
The co-op is in a period of rapid growth. In our audit week of October 5-October 11 2006, customer transactions totalled nearly 400, up from a weekly average of 272 over the previous audit period of March/April 2006.
Over the October audit week, approximating the turnover of bulk unpackaged goods (estimated from running orders) was:
| Nuts | 40 kg |
| Oils, tahini, sauces | 20 litres |
| Snacks | 20kg |
| Rice | 70kg |
| Millet | 5kg |
| Oats | 50kg |
| Wheat flours | 50kg |
| Muesli/breakfast cereals | 15kg |
| Other cereals/flours/grains | 70kg |
| Dried fruit | 60kg |
| Beans/pulses | 35kg |
| Herbs/spices | 3.5kg |
| Teas | 2kg |
| Honey | 5kg |
| Cheese | 8 kgs |
| Cleaning products | 15 litres |
| Organic fresh fruit and vegetables | 400kgs a week |
Amount of waste avoidance, reduction, re-use and/or recycling.
The ANU Food Co-op takes a full life-cycle approach to waste minimisation, considering every feasible factor of our waste impact, from the resource costs of the products we use in our operations, through to the eventual destination of the products at the end of their lifecycles in the households of consumers. Our printing protocol, for example, recognises the waste produced by inefficient usage of paper and the waste implicit in the manufacture and disposal of the printer itself. Complementarily, we provide skills and infrastructure to our customers to facilitate responsible disposal of products purchase from us. In between these extremes our own operation and our own consumption behaviour has been carefully design to have minimal waste impact.
Waste awareness carries across to all aspects of our own operations:
- in the products that we sell to our customers;
- in our selection of, and dealings with, suppliers; and
- in conducting our internal operations.
Our procedures do not currently provide for ongoing waste auditing, although such ideas re under consideration as we begin to seek external recognition of our systems as best-practice. For the purpose of this award, however, we undertook an audit of the waste streams for a 'typical' week, (5/10/2006-11/10/2006) in order to provide estimates of our total waste streams. Table 1 is a summary of the major waste types, quantities consumed and the waste management strategy in place.
| Waste Type | Unit | Quantity Supplied | Quantity Reused | Quantity Recycled | Quantity to Landfill |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cardboard | Boxes | 30 | 20% | 80% | |
| Styrofoam | Boxes | 10 | 30% | 70% | |
| Rigid plastic | 20L Containers | 5 | 25% | 75% | |
| Non-recyclable plastic | L of manually compacted plastic | 20L | 100% | ||
| Steel | 20L Tin | 1 | 100% | ||
| Compostable Organic Waste | Kg | 10-20 | 100% |
Paper and glass were not present in the waste flows for this sample week are not accounted for. All paper in the coop is reused and recycled and sourced from 100% post-consumer recycled content paper. Typically, 1-2 reams are used every two months. All glass is reused and recycled but does not make up a significant volume of waste.
Customers
- We encourage customers to buy in bulk by giving an (additional -- over and above the standard relevent member discounts) 10% off the price of a product if they purchase a quantity such as a whole bag, or box.
- Individually packaged items are kept to a minimum and where possible we sell products from large containers, encouraging customers to supply their own bags and containers.
- We provide a container re-use service for non food-products, allowing members to give excess jars to us for re-use by other customers, simultaneously making it easier for customers to buy in bulk, and providing an avenue for customers to re-use rather than recycle bulk their own household glass waste stream.
- Bags for produce are sold, without being advertised or displayed, but rather provided on request only.
- We give preference to produce our members can supply, thus reducing packaging and fossil fuels used in transportation from our suppliers in Sydney.
Even bulk food will eventually be turned in to waste - but our responsibility does not end at the front door of the shop. Members are invited and encouraged to bring their food craps back to the co-op for composting, and to take compost from the co-op for their own garden. This facilitates organic waste recycling through infrastructure, but also through creating a social norms of composting and through sharing skills and knowledge about good composting practise in the most hands-on way possible. Our structure of voluntary labour greatly facilitates this. In the course of their voluntary labour, members are exposed to the waste management expertise of the co-op, normalising the practices of re-use and recycling, and providing concrete practical examples of how to do it.
Facilitating other parties' waste reduction initiatives
- Members are encouraged to donate clean containers/jars for others to use for purchasing bulk cleaning products.
- We take donations of second hand magazines (particularly on themes of sustainability) for members to look through.
- Community noticeboard - open to advertisements of local service providers, accommodation vacant/wanted, events and items for sale/to give away.
- We participate in composting, providing an active composting service accepting waste from members and distributing it for free to members' gardens
- we provide a hub of expertise in sustainability issues, by attracting individuals with an expertise in through our status as a recognised leader in the area, and putting them in social contact with less expert individuals, in the social context of voluntary labour on our premises, andregular social events.
Suppliers
Our purchasing policy reflects a commitment to waste reduction at several points:
- We favour organic products over products of conventional farming. Recognising that, all else being equal, organic farming motivates less catchment runoff pollution and lower non-renewable energy input, we count our support of the organic industry as major contribution to our waste minimisation efforts. By supporting this industry we are not just supporting the health of our members, but reducing our waste impacts from the very start of the supply chain In our audit week we sold, by weight
- fresh fruit and vegetables: 85% certified organic/biodynamic (the other 15% home-grown and thus not certified)
- dry goods: 60% certified organic/biodynamic produce
- We favour local or regional suppliers over remote suppliers local/regional suppliers, and Australian suppliers over international suppliers (except where exceptional circumstances arise, such as our purchase of international Fair Trade coffee in a bid of support for sustainable production in other countries). So, our roster of produce includes, for example,
- Geoff Foster's Organic farm near Braidwood
- Bulk cheese and tomatoes from Bega
- Pialligo apples
- Goat's milk, chicken and duck eggs from Canberra itself
- the bags we purchase for occasional customer needs are minimal waste impact ones
- 100% recycled post consumer paper bags sold for buying dry goods (nuts, herbs, rice etc)
- Durable thickness bags have been chosen so they can be re-used in the future.
- We favour bulk products over individually ones wherever possible (with exceptions, as above, for fair trade products). In our audit week we sold, by volume, approximately 90% bulk food.
Internal operations
Shop Floor and general operations
- All building furniture is recycled or re-used: Shop fittings and racks are made from reclaimed demolition-site timber, by Thor's Hammer recycled timber. Seating in our lounge area is all second-hand, from members, and tip shops.
- cleaning and maintenance is performed using low-impact biodegradable cleaning agents from our bulk environmentally conscious cleaning agent suppliers. Buckets and bins used in cleaning processes are collected from our own waste stream of damaged bulk product containers. We are in the process of auditing our cleaning agents here to ensure compatibility with total grey water recycling systems; and the outcomes of our research here will be presented to members as an informational display.
- Signage is made from recycled board and paper.
- Signage and surfaces are painted using donated second hand or salvaged paints wherever possible. When not possible, environmentally friendly paints using alternative solvents and containing no heavy metals are purchased and used.
Office
Our office procedures are designed for minimal waste impact at all phases, from the selection of office furniture through to day-to-day operations.
- Our printing are met with the assistance of ANU's office recycling programs. Unused HP Laserjet 4 cartridges were made available to us from their supply of consumables for obsoleted hardware.
- An "obsolete" HP Laserjet printer was sourced second hand for less than the market price of the cartridges.
- This printer does not have an automatic duplexer but since the vast majority of our printing is on re-used single-sided paper in any case, this does not hamper our resource efficiency. Further, sinc e asignificant portion of our printing is for signage and infomartional notices, which cannot in any case benefit from duplexing, it represents a significant saving for our organisation. Additionally, we have managed, by adopting this "obsolete" hardware, to avoid the wastage of toner and electronics otherwise destined to be discarded. Poster and flyer runs are done on this printer with one sided paper for the most part, with unbleached recycled paper as a fallback. (This report, printed off-site to allow us to reproduce colour images and to facilitate your internal photocopying procedures, will represent one of less than half a dozen diversions from this regime in the course of the year, and a negligible part of our total waste stream.)
- 80% of our fliers, instruction sheets and communiqués are printed on re-used paper.
- Our printer requires that 20% of its print jobs are on fresh blank paper to ensure smooth function of its rollers and to avoid toner build-up. We meet this need from our bulk purchase of 100% post consumer recycled Australian unbleached paper, using it for all our promotional material, registration/membership forms, and in our office when necessary. We sell this product to our customers at near cost-price.
- Our other computing and office hardware (computers, monitors, faxes and photocopiers), with the single exception of our ADSL modem, was accepted from second hand donations after assessing our office needs. By using hardware typically considered obsolete we managed to reduce our IT bill, divert potential waste from disposal, and avoid the manufacturing and shipping wastes inherent in buying new hardware.
- Long-life energy saving light globes are used throughout the shop reducing our light bulb waste stream to negligible amounts, and simultaneously lowering our consumption of polluting electricity.
- Our energy waste is reduced by a timer in the cool rooms turns off the cooling systems at night.
- Resources are shared with affiliated organisation to minimise maintenance: Our meeting room and toilet facilities are shared with other ROCKS local resident-group) organisations, such as the Conservation Council of the South East Region and Canberra, and the Environment & Sustainability centre.
Waste Streams
Naturally, despite our heavy commitment to waste avoidance at all scales of our operation, there are still waste streams produced as a by product of our operations. These are handled with a mind to maximal efficiency, preferencing higher-grade use of waste (re-use or "upcycling") to lower-grade (recycling)
- Organic waste: All organic waste is composed on-site in a two-phase compost heap that also accepts organic waste from members and provides a community learning experience in composting
- All new paper that is brought in, already recycled, is re-used once in the printer before being recycled.
- Packaging (crates, boxes, palettes), first of all, is returned to suppliers for re-use.
- waxed paper and polystyrene boxes used for shipping produce are recycled through Agent Green Recycling: the foam boxes get compressed and recycled into other reusable materials, and the waxed boxes have the wax removed and the cardboard recycled.
- Bulk produce bags are made freely available to members, and are taken for use in e.g. bagging soil and manure. Innovative one-off uses are also found for some products - for example, the donation of hessian bags to Orana school for use in their three legged races and sack races.
- Worn shipping palettes that cannot be returned are used by members for things such as making compost bins at homes or planter boxes
- Standard ACT recycling services are used for other waste streams, such as glass.
Leadership, innovation and originality of resource efficiency initiatives.
The Food co-op's most outstanding area of market leadership is in the provision of organic and local food. As a non-profit organisation we are able to make these products available at prices largely comparable to the prices of equivalent non-organic and/or non-local products in supermarkets, and significantly lower than 'boutique' organic vendors. As such, we are expanding the market for organic products into different demographics than those in which they are typically available and breaking down the 'gentrification' of organic food. As noted elsewhere, organic food is a product that motivates far lower waste, pollution and energy input in the supply chain than comparable conventional produce.
Comprehensiveness of resource efficiency initiatives across all aspects of the organisation
Our waste minimisation practices are more than lightly integrated into our practice - they are central to every aspect of the Food Co-op's function. As detailed above, every aspect of the Food Co-op's function is assessed against its resource efficiency and practices are continuously evaluated and modified to maintain exemplary resource efficiency. All waste and potential waste within the Co-op is assessed, not as a once off, or periodic project, but as an ongoing business protocol.
Membership involvement
Moreover, waste minimisation best-practice is not merely a function of our procedures and management. The Co-op maximises the benefit of these initiatives with the volunteer-led nature of our initiatives. Our volunteer-driven structure and open management (all board meetings are open to all members and general meetings are held regularly) ensure that members are intimately involved in the details of our operations. By fostering membership involvement with the processes of waste management, and by keeping the processes driven and operated by our membership base, we ensure that the skills, motivation and knowledge of the operation of our initiatives is diffused to as wide a segment of the community as possible. Moreover, by providing a forum in which waste minimisation is the norm, we act as an effective hub of 'viral marketing' waste minimisation approaches. We see ourselves as a centre o the diffusion of expertise in practical skills in waste minimisation, as a contact point for people interested in the area and as a node in a network of waste minimisation, with freely available contact information for our partners in waste minimisation. Such knowledge naturally flows in both directions- as much as the co-op seeks to diffuse information, it is also the information of our members which informs our practise. Suggestions from members to further our commitment to waste reduction are all considered and implemented when possible. Members/customers are also encouraged to give details of products they have sourced that require less packaging or are organic/biodynamic alternatives that management is as yet unaware of.
Cost effectiveness of the initiative(s).
With the exception of certain ethical purchasing choices, such as occasional the use of high-grade recycled paper in our printers, and voluntarily recycling polystyrene boxes, all our waste saving in initiatives are cost-saving.
Specifically:
- Office and Lounge furniture - spent nil, saved over $1000
- Computers - spent nil (except for ADSL modem) saved over $1000
- Shop Fittings hand made from waste timber (shelving/cabinets/front counter) - saved over $4000
- Scales/cash register - bought some second hand saving over $600
- Printer - bought one for $30 and got ink for free saving hundreds of dollars on printing.
- even the aforementioned paper recycling is in aggregate a cost saving over conventional printing practice - the recycled paper is 250% more expensive than conventional office paper, but as it meets only 20% of our printing needs, this is still saving of 30% on conventional office practise.
Our cost avoidance due to our extensive re-use of materials is difficult to account. Landfill waste streams are already negligible, with under 20 litres of landfill waste of mass under 1 kilogram in a typical week. There are bulk waste trips to the waste disposal centres and no skips. As our procedures are part of a 'whole of system' approach, however, under a process of continuous refinement, it is difficult to precisely classify any part of that proves as a quantifiable waste stream below some "norm". Certainly, the percentage of our stock turnover by mass which ends up in landfill would be far lower than any conventionally run supermarket. Taking into account our avoidance of waste both in our upstream supply chain in in our downstream consumers is a major research project in itself. I would be better to evaluate it by saying that we consider zero waste to landfill to be the benchmark, and we fall short of that by one kilogram.
Potential for broader use
Membership
As stated in section 3, concerning the comprehensiveness of our initiatives, we propagate waste minimisation techniques extensively to households through our membership's involvement in the management and procedure of the organisation. To re-iterate, this is our primary method method of sharing expertise, and the key strength setting us ahead in the field of organisational waste efficiency. Expanding on that point, 2006 has seen an explicit attempt to leverage our membership's knowledge pool by promoting knowledge and skill sharing projects. Our revamped community noticeboard is available to solicit involvement in various projects both on and off site, with a strong bent towards general themes of sustainability. We have also seen a shift to collaborative online documentation. Co-op notices, records, ideas and so on are edited, shared and proposed in a group-editable website open to the general public. For example, our waste management tips are documented in an online web page --- Waste minimisation --- and this application itself was collaboratively edited entirely on that website --- 2006 Nowaste Awards. As such, the research that has gone into this application have from the first moment been part of the knowledge base of the co-op membership, and will be maintained as such, regardless of the outcome of the award. However, our commitment to disseminating waste management practice does not end with our membership.
Wider Community
This year sees a shift into a new raft of community outreach schemes. We are in the first stages of organising promotional wholefoods cooking courses on the self-catered residential campus colleges, and as mentioned before, the website is accessible not only to membership of the co-op itself, but is available for access by and open to contributions from, the wider public.
Cross-organization links
We also foster inter-organisational ties that are instrumental in our waste minimisation efforts, and through which we promote the sharing of those efforts.
Partners
- ROCKS, the residents' association of the precinct on which our premises are located, shares composing and maintenance of share facilities
- ANUGreen has shared supplies and expertise on office waste minimisation.
- ANUSA; we are an affiliated society of the ANU Student's Association and many of the ANUSA's Environment Collective are also active members of the Co-op. The ANUSA Environmnt collective has for many years purchased all food for their events from the Co-op.
- We support and promote mobile phone recycling through Mobile Muster kit, an initiative of the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association
- We have been at of the Cool Communities Greenhouse gas emission reduction procgram, through the Conservation Council of the South East Region and Canberra, a co-resident in the ROCKS group.
Sponsors
- Thor's Hammer, as mentioned elsewhere has reduced our costs and impact by constructing shelving an fittings from reclaimed timber. On the business website the co-op is cited as a formative step in the foundation of that business as it stands today.
