Composting

Sustainability has been a priority at PBC for the last few years. Last year, through the generous donation of $10,000 from Bendigo Bank Tugun Community Branch, we were able to construct The Sustainability Shed. This shed houses a range of equipment designed to reduce the waste we send to landfill.

Our main sustainability focus at the moment relates to diverting food waste from landfill and composting it using the commercial composting machine we purchased last year thanks to a Federal Government grant. The composting machine processes up to 100kg of food waste per day and reduces it in volume by 80-90%, meaning 100kg of food waste becomes 10-20kg of concentrated compost that can be used in the school gardens.

The machine can process a range of food waste, including items that you wouldn’t ordinarily compost in a home compost heap, like meat, dairy products, bread, pasta and seafood. So far this year, we have been diverting food waste from the canteens, Home Economics kitchens and Trade Training Centre, with staffrooms also able to opt-in to dropping their food waste off at the shed if they want to. Since the program began in October of 2020, we have diverted 420.4kg of organic waste from landfill.

In addition to the on-site composting, we have also formed a partnership with Gecko Environment Council and the Southern Beaches Community Garden to create the Community Composting Program, allowing local residents to drop their food scraps in a bin at Gecko House (129 Duringan Street, Currumbin). Volunteers from the Southern Beaches Community Garden collect the bins and drop them at school for processing in our composting machine. The program has only been running for a couple of weeks but has so far processed more than 50kg of food scraps from the community.

We hope to expand the composting program across the school to ensure all food waste is diverted from landfill and directed into the composting machine and are currently investigating the best options to make this happen.

Please consider getting involved in the Community Composting Program and dropping your food scraps in the bin outside Gecko House.

Tom Pasley, Bianca Benigno – Sustainability Coordinators