SKYCITY Auckland has successfully tackled a huge food waste problem, diverting nearly 500 tonnes – the equivalent weight of 142 buses – from landfill to become compost for kiwifruit orchards and landscaping companies.
Operating one of the largest commercial catering operations in New Zealand, with more than 20 kitchens servicing its hospitality, hotel and convention operations, SKYCITY Auckland required a daily service to pick-up the more than one tonne of food waste generated at the precinct.
A signatory of the Climate Leaders Coalition, SKYCITY has set a target of eliminating its food waste to landfill as part of its environment strategy that works to reduce energy, waste, and carbon emissions.
SKYCITY wnvironmental manager Courtney Simpson said food waste diversion was the single biggest opportunity she identified to reduce waste to landfill when starting with SKYCITY in 2016.
“We knew food waste was a big problem and we wanted to find a really good solution for it; one that would benefit our environment and our community,” she said. “So our food waste programme has three main areas; reducing waste in our kitchens, donating any surplus food we can to KiwiHarvest, and, for everything else, we send it to be commercially composted.”
SKYCITY partnered with EnviroNZ, which commercially composts all the precinct’s food waste at the company’s state-of-the-art composting facility in Hampton Downs. Using covered aeration bunkers, the food waste is blended with green waste and composted for eight weeks before being screened, matured and sold to kiwifruit orchards and landscape yards in South Auckland.
To ensure the compost is of a high quality, it was important to ensure that the teams across SKYCITY’s kitchens changed the way they did things. EnviroNZ worked closely with SKYCITY to deliver training sessions, new signage, 110 new wheelie bins, 10,000 new compostable bin liners and implemented new collection processes.
“There were a number of unique challenges in putting together a food waste programme for an operation the size of SKYCITY,” said Dave Elder, general manager market development at EnviroNZ. “They have a huge operation that requires a seven-day-a-week service, which we’d never offered before, and a lot of different training and policies needed to be put in place to make the process work across all of their kitchens.”
