“The totally natural way to reduce, reuse and recycle organic waste”

This was the theme at the Macau International Environmental Co-Operation Forum and Exhibition, held March 2012 in Macau.

Many ‘green’ companies and organizations from around the globe exhibited at the show.

Bokashi bins were part of the Hong Kong based ‘Greeners Actions Group’ exhibition, who attended as part of their programme to reduce organic waste in Hong Kong.

More than 5000 people attended the 3 day exhibition and the photos here were taken at the Greener’s Action Stand.

27/28/29 April.

Wellington City Council are displaying Organic Waste Options and ZingBokashi is one of the options being shown … visit website

Green Living Show and NZ Organic Expo, May 12/13 Alexandra Park, Greenlane Auckland.

Come and visit the ZingBokashi stand and talk to the experts.

Neville Burt (“Mr Bokashi”) will be doing a presentation ‘Saving a Community from Odour’ in the Lyell room on Sat at 2pm and again on Sunday at 4pm. Register for one of these seminars at www.organicexpo.co.nz and a chance to win a bottle of wine from an award winning South Island sustainable vineyard.

For more information visit www.organicexpo.co.nz

Recently I was invited to present a talk to a group called Woman in Farming about the role of ZingBokashi in waste management down on the farm.

A common issue was unpleasant odours from their waste water or septic tank systems Much of these are as a result of use of antibiotics and domestic chemicals –in particular some laundry products.

Compost Zing is proven as a useful tool in controlling odours in septic systems and often is combined with EMA or activated EM. This combo can be used in old-style septic tanks as well as in the modern chambered types.

Regular usage results in the following benefits.

• Significant reduction in unpleasant odours from both open and closed systems.
• Improved operating efficiency
• Reduced surface crusting
• Reduced sludge accumulation
• All natural
• The combination of all these factors will assist or help in improving the overall operating efficiency of all septic and waste water systems.
• An added bonus is having the cleaning period extended

Often when systems are overloaded smells will also appear when there has been none for some time.

This often occurs when family members or visitors arrive and septics systems can easily become ‘out of balance ‘ during this time.

Regular usage of either Compost Zing and or combined with EMA will improve the function of your septic systems.

The Kapiti District Council recently held a Greenest street competition where the idea was to see what street could generate the least amount of waste going to landfill over a given time. Participants had a choice of ways and methods to do this and these had to be approved by the organisers.

One street, Rainbow Court in Raumati had a number of residents elect to use ZingBokashi for the processing of their food waste and the comments below were contributed by Rainbow Court resident Glenda Robb.

Rainbow Court in Raumati's community garden

“Our Greenest St competition is over – and while we didn’t win the overall prize, we did get the best community initiative prize for our community garden. 

I have dug several buckets of my bokashi bucket stew into the garden and am just amazed at how fast it seems to break down. As I’ve planted up my spring garden now, I took my latest bucket down to the community garden where we had a working bee today.

The focus of the day was building compost heaps, so my bucket went into the middle of one pile where I am sure it will get things going in next to no time. We made three big 1m x 1m x 1m piles using wood chip mulch, grass clippings, horse poo and bokashi, watered it down, and covered it over with old carpet. We await the production of compost in next to no time!

At least one of the other bokashi owners is doing the same with her full buckets as she doesn’t have a garden in her own back yard.

We have several large plastic compost bins in the community garden where anyone can take their organic kitchen scraps and layer them with wood mulch, so some are bringing their full buckets down and putting them into our system. We find that is a better way than digging it straight into the garden, as often there isn’t a gap when you need to empty your bucket.

Then, once a month at our working bees, we turn the compost and add it to the gardens when the gaps appear.”

Greeners Action, the Hong Kong based distributor for ZingBokashi recently attended the Low Carbon Fair in Canton at the invitation of the Chinese Government.

Greeners Action are active in education in recycling issues in Hong Kong and as food waste is a big problem in China, attending the fair was an opportunity to introduce to the people of Canton [pop 10 million] the bokashi method as a way to solve their food waste problem.

Over 800 organisations and people were introduced to Bokashi composting over the 4 days the fair was held.

Member of Greeners Action engages with interested people-Low Carbon Fair Canton Oct 2011.

ZingBokashi in Canton, China.