Enriching Ikea

Greenlister Enrich360 was at Ikea in Richmond, Victoria on 5 June to celebrate the one year anniversary of its food waste dehydrator installation. Food waste from IKEA’s cafe and restaurant is collected and put into Enrich360’s onsite dehydrator where it is reduced by up to 93 per cent of its original mass. This is then collected by the Enrich360 team and ends up as fertiliser for IKEA’s own fruit and vegetable suppliers. 

“Our relationship with Ikea has seen in excess of 80 tonnes of food waste converted to fertiliser in the first year,” Enrich360 CEO Dean Turner was happy to report.

“All this stops food waste going to landfill where it would have produced methane gas which is over 20 times more dangerous to the ozone layer CO2, and leachates which damage the soil and groundwater.”

Sand hits the road

Continuing down the road with construction materials, a $20 million glass and asphalt recycling facility has opened in Melbourne. Opened by construction company Alex Fraser Group, the plant is capable of producing 800 tonnes of construction sand per day from shards of kerbside bottle glass that would otherwise be destined for landfill. 

This is great news in a world that is increasingly concerned that we are depleting our natural reserves of sand and at a time when demand for sand  is soaring.

A new report on the global sand market predicts growth of 12.7 per cent in sand as a commodity by 2025. The sand industry was valued at over $63 billion in 2016, and expansions in “industrialisation and real estate… especially in regions like Asia Pacific” is predicted to increase this value over the coming years.

This growth applies to both natural and artificially generated sand, the latter of which is becoming increasingly sought after as natural sand supplies diminish. In Australia, sand created from recycled glass shards is used in building roads, such as the recent Tullamarine Freeway construction.