Cafe Abundance Cornish Composting

Aim

Setting up community/ commercial composting in rural Cornwall, reducing environmental disaster of incinerating food waste.

C A Composts CIC is a sister company to Cafe Abundance The Real Junk Food Project Torpoint & Rame. Through 18 months of operating Pop-Up community cafes, using food which would otherwise be wasted, to create and serve tasty, healthy meals on a Pay As You Feel basis, we have become increasingly aware of the amount of unavoidable food waste produced by the food industry.

In Cornwall our food waste is destined for incineration. This is crazy for the environment both in terms of wasting valuable organic material and the miles of driving required to take it to the incinerator. The obvious solution is to set up large scale community composting on the Rame Peninsula which Cafe Abundance can use. 

By inviting other local food outlets to join in by paying us to remove and process their biodegradable waste waste we:

• provide local employment, 
• provide opportunities for local primary schools to join in with composting for a better environment
• allow local households with no gardens to compost their biodegradable waste
• engage the local community and visitors to our beautiful area in thinking about food waste,
• use waste sawdust from local boat building a carpentry to facilitate the composting,
• generate valuable compost which can be used to improve local soil fertility or sold to generate further income,
• generate funds to subsidise the work of Cafe Abundance cafes, tackling food poverty and social cohesion in the area.
• reduce the amount of heavy waste vehicles on the road (because the rest of the waste can be dealt with by a small local waste and recycling firm) and the nonsense of sending valuable organic matter to incineration or landfill.

Apart from the initial capital costs of purchasing the hardware, this will be a self funding project, supported by community engagement enabling volunteers to facilitate household composting throug the facility too.

This project closed unsuccessfully on 1st June 2018