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I believe my food waste is a big deal for Earth’s climate. By ending it I believe I’m doing more than anything else I’ve done to save it.

If you don’t believe that’s also the case for your own food waste, may I invite you to count yours?

Look – I know counting your food waste may be the most boring invitation you’ve received this year but please read on.

Any of us, particularly in rich countries, can count our food waste pollution – just download this free counter. 

If you accept this invitation then picture this – at your own table you can join the rapidly growing numbers of those of us who are eating our way to a better climate.

For simple folk such as me there’s a quick video that holds our hand to walk us through the calculator showing how to use it.

Those working with me created it during a recent project to end café food waste, funded by the NSW EPA.  

This project – called, coolseats – was one of seven projects where those of us passionate about reducing and ending food waste partnered with the NSW EPA. It provided funds to help end food waste in our different ways.  Of these diverse projects the coolseats project trialled a seat that is also a compost bin. 

Eight cafes in country and city areas participated, placing food waste in coolseats on their own land or footpath outside. 

In the other projects the partners included a cooking school, communication and industry bodies and an organic recovery and local food growing groups.

Here’s some examples that show the how, and why, any of us may end our food waste.

The Knox Street Bar in Sydney’s inner city Chippendale was one of the participants.

After explaining in its Instagram video that garnishes in cocktails are meant to be eaten, patrons responded and told the bar owner, Bjorn Godfrey, they’d started eating their garnishes.

The bar composts leftover garnishes, napkins and paper straws in a coolseat outside the bar.  It’s ended some of its food waste.

Another café showed something we saw again and again in the project: no matter when we begin to end food waste we also start to end other waste.  Café Guilia, also in Chippendale, puts its food waste into two coolseats.

The café gets potatoes in hessian sacks which it used to throw out but are now used to cover the food waste and gradually decay to become compost. 

The compost from the seats is put in used ziplock coffee bean bags which used to be thrown out but are now given to patrons to use as compost on their pot plants and gardens. 

This has the benefit of freeing up more composting space for café food waste. Adding to the mix are newspapers, which used to be thrown out, but are now mulched and mixed with the compost to quicken the decaying process.

Within their coolseat’s first week, Cafe Giulia composted 327.8kg of food waste, which prevented up to 2514kg of CO2 emissions. (These figures, the science and the calculations are explained here.)

The café has reduced the six daily food waste pick ups to three a week and halved its waste pick up costs.

While cafes may freely choose and negotiate their waste service provider, for most Australian households there is no freedom to choose a waste provider. 

Worse, unlike the US and Europe there is no financial reward or incentive for households here to reduce their waste. As a result a river of gold flows through local councils to the bank accounts of a few waste service providers who control most of the waste and, thanks to local councils, have guaranteed, locked-in customers – we ratepayers. 

We Australian households and our highly polluting waste are imprisoned by a failed and weekly failing and polluting financially and environmentally disastrous system.

Yet, other householder utility bills – gas, electricity, water – are higher or lower depending on the amount we use. 

To use the words of the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, who said on 5 April 2022 when describing the 30 months left to we humans to end climate pollution, Australian garbage bills are prehistoric, sitting-on-hands “moral and economic madness”. 

The biggest barrier to ending household food waste pollution is the domination of that sector by a few big waste companies that  have local councils and state governments in the palm of their hands. 

But that’s a story for another day – soon, because, as I wrote here, the UN told the world on 5 April 2022, all of us (including those waste companies) only have 30 months left – to 2025 – to end the pollution that’s caused by food waste and other climate-killing pollution.

We the rich can end our food waste this year – let’s eat to that.

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