Sustainable cafe saves costs and stops waste going to landfill - video transcript

In this Sassafras of Paddington climate action case study video, learn how a café in Brisbane’s inner west saved money and tackled its food waste problem by sending it to a commercial composting facility.

Sustainable cafe saves costs and stops waste going to landfill

[Chris Zirbel - Owner, Sassafras of Paddington café]

What does climate action mean to me?

It means doing what we can when we can as often as we can. We never can do everything, but if we all do just a little bit, we'll make a big difference.

My name is Chris, I run Sassafras of Paddington in Paddington, Brisbane. We are a sustainable café.

So I'm a chef by trade and grew up on a cattle and small crops mixed farm, which means that we were fairly well self-sufficient, sustainable for the environment, but we were also able to enjoy the benefits of that, and that has really instilled in me a philosophy to carry that on and do the same thing and bring that to the city, share that philosophy with the rest of the world.

So when I took over Sassafras here about 10 years back, we used to use just general waste bins. So to put it in perspective, we were using about 10 wheelie bins a week.

There was a few problems arising from that. One, it was the cost involved; 2, we had pest and vermin; 3, during summer, all of that material, because it was only being collected once a week, was starting to create a bit of a bad odour, and we needed to solve all of these problems.

And we started to look at our organic waste and trying to find a solution for having that waste not go into landfill, and also, to have it collected more readily, how we would store that waste, how we would get that waste transported to a composting plant.

So we started working with a contractor who was able to collect our organic waste a few times a week, and that helped us to eliminate the odours and the pests and the vermin problem that we had. It also enabled us to reduce the amount of landfill from 10 wheelie bins a week down to just 2.

We've been able to save about a tonne of waste from going to landfill every month. So over the year, we're looking at saving greenhouse gas emissions by not sending all our organic waste to landfill.

We also turn all of our used cooking oil into biodiesel, both of those help us save quite a lot of emissions each year.

I would encourage other hospitality businesses to jump on board and have a look online for some great resources. There are definitely contractors out there who can help you out for a very, very good price to effectively take care of your waste.

By doing this, it's actually saving us up to 50% costs on our waste management, and it's helping to reduce our other purchases, probably by about 10 to 15% over the year as well.

It's not as difficult as it seems to get yourself on board, and it actually makes economic sense to do so.

Watch the Sassafras of Paddington climate action case study video.