Cork Urban Soil Project: Turning food waste into fertile compost

By looking at leftovers as an opportunity rather than a problem, the award-winning Cork Urban Soil Project — CUSP — is modelling a new way of turning would-be waste into a valuable commodity

Fri, 15 Mar, 2024 - 02:00

Caroline Hennessy

CORK Urban Soil Project is leading the way in food waste. “We were pioneers, figuring it out as we went along,” says Texas-born, Cork-based Virginia O’Gara, one of the founders of CUSP.

This inspiring project has been winning awards for its closed-loop recycling system, most recently the Community Food Award from the Irish Food Writers’ Guild and Innovator of the Year at the 2023 Food & Wine Restaurant of the Year Awards.

It’s not surprising that this idea has grabbed people’s attention. In recent years we have become aware of the importance of moving from an outdated linear process — a pattern of create-use-dispose, which leads to pollution - into a circular model of waste management. By taking food waste, turning it into valuable compost and then using that compost to grow more food, CUSP has effectively demonstrated that the closed loop can work on a community level.

This practice also has more benefits: the availability of urban compost enables people to grow food close to where they live, enabling food sovereignty, improving biodiversity and creating community.

The idea for CUSP came from a music festival, the Body & Soul festival at Ballinlough Castle in 2017. My Goodness — the vegan, probiotic food company founded by O’Gara and her husband Donal - was invited to join the Food on Board area. The aim was to create a space within the festival with food companies that valued sustainability: meals were served on reusable wooden boards.

In addition to avoiding single-use containers, a mobile biodigester was on site so all food scraps could be composted. “It was an incredible success,” says O’Gara. “And it was fascinating as a social experiment, looking at how people in a field at a festival have to deal with their own [food-related] waste.”

Inspired by seeing how this zero-waste system worked at Body & Soul, O’Gara decided it was time to try it out at home in Cork: “When we knew we could do it in a field with thousands of strangers, we brought back the idea of trying to do it in our own town.”

O’Gara, who has the ability to educate, inspire, and involve people, came to Ireland in 2006 to study permaculture at Kinsale College. “The problem is the solution,” she says.

This is one of the original principles of permaculture, making CUSP a simple but effective way of dealing with food waste.

Virginia O'Gara, of My Goodness winner of the Community Food Award at the Irish Food Writers' Guild. Picture; Eddie O'Hare

Within My Goodness, O’Gara has always worked towards having as little waste as possible — the company even uses filtered rainwater as the basis for its fermented drinks — and developing closed-loop systems.

This was no easy task, especially when they started out. “It was difficult and expensive,” she explains. “Our bottles for kombucha and kefir were refillable, our jars of sauerkraut and kimchi were repackable and we committed ourselves to working with only independent shops, places where people were also committed to bringing back those bottles and jars.”

But one aspect of the business was stubbornly linear - the scraps of food that could not be used or fermented.

The donation of a second-hand Joraform aerobic biodigestor from Munster Technological University (MTU) meant that O’Gara could do something about this. With the help of a team that included the Cork Environmental Forum, food systems thinker Molly Garvey, human rights activist Seán Binder, project manager Erin O’Brien and gardener Aoife O’Connell, CUSP came into being.

They started small, initially focusing on My Goodness and the (very little) food waste that they produced. “It enabled us to monitor all that we put in there,” says O’Gara, “and gave us time and space to play with this closed-loop system. When we started, we weren’t experts at all. We couldn’t find any information about projects like it in Ireland or Europe. There was one place in Chicago with a similar project but it had different mechanics. We just had to figure it out.”

The biodigester can take in 700kg of waste — food scraps, coffee grounds, cardboard — every week, processing it over four weeks to make 350kg of dark, crumbly compost. It’s a neat, compact machine which, says O’Gara, can serve up to 100 families. Unlike regular garden composting, there’s no smell, and because it’s closed, rodents aren’t a problem.

For the second step of the project, the CUSP team built a modular movable garden out of old pallets and, in their usual resourceful way, lined them with old election posters. Filled with compost, these are spaces to grow more vegetables, which get used in the My Goodness kitchen, with any scraps going back into the biodigester.

“We proved that we can turn would-be waste into a resource,” says O’Gara, “and we would love to see it roll out on a larger scale.”

It’s a model that can be scaled up and replicated in many other environments and communities. She knows of a five-star hotel, a HSE local health office and a defence force unit, which have all bought biodigesters after seeing what CUSP has achieved.

My Goodness has a shop in Cork’s English Market and O’Gara hopes that management there will get a biodigester to deal with food waste onsite. “It would be a fantastic move for the English Market and for Cork city. We would be able to work with a circular economy right in the city centre.”

With all the lessons learned through CUSP, O’Gara’s ambition is to “create a green heart in Cork city centre to address the lack of food sovereignty in this country. We have the ability and time to design food security for the people of Cork, to take the problem and turn it into a nutrient-rich solution for our city and the children of our city.”