Free calculator saves money for any user
A new, free calculator cuts your waste bills and avoids polluting Earth’s climate.
Developed with funding from the NSW EPA in Australia, the calculator has been tested during a project to end cafe food waste in NSW, Australia.
Count your food waste costs, savings and avoided pollution with this calculator.
The calculator is free for you to download and is accompanied by a short video tutorial.
Cafe owners have put their food waste figures over 7 days into the calculator, along with some other waste they’ve been able to reduce. Each day, the cafe puts into the calculator the figures for: food spoiled in storage, food wasted during preparation, and food left as waste on the customers’ plates.
The food waste is either composted, given to farmers for their livestock, or sent to landfill, and the calculator tracks what goes where.
Composting helps save other waste. That’s because the action of composting prompts ideas in us to find other ways of avoiding waste.
For example, Cafe Giulia in Chippendale gets potatoes in hessian sacks. These sacks, previously thrown away as ‘waste’, are now put on top of the composting food waste to protect the worms and encourage them to travel to the top of the compost pile. (Worms avoid light which the sacks prevent, so encouraging the worms to go up to the top of the compost and increase the rate of food breakdown. Each day a compost worm eats their own weight in food waste.) Used 3 kg plastic coffee bean sacks are stored after being used at the coffee machine and are filled a third full with compost and given free to customers to take for their pot plants and gardens. That then also frees up space in the compost for more waste food to be added to the compost.
By tracking waste figures, a cafe can also track cost savings in food waste bin collection. During the project and with two coolseats, Cafe Giulia has halved its food waste pickups - from 6 down to 3 pickups of one 120 litre bin a week.
Because that cafe, like almost all cafes, is billed on a ‘user pays’ system, there is an immediate financial reward to it and any other cafe when they cut waste, because immediate financial savings flow directly from the reduced number of pickups. Cafes are free to choose their service provider and to shop around for prices. We know now that with four coolseats Cafe Giulia can end its food waste and those collection bills
There is no rational justification for cafes being free to choose their waste service provider but households locked into local council waste collection services.
Research into waste reduction and behaviour changes that end or reduce waste show that the most effective and cheapest waste system is one which is based on user pays; if you, the householder or business, don’t ‘throw’ out or waste then you don’t pay for a service you don’t use, or if you throw less then you pay less. Some of the research is here.
The calculator automatically calculates the pollution the cafe avoids by composting the food waste.
By taking photos of these things, making short videos and posting these on their social media pages, the cafes may also grow their customers’ loyalty, create options to support the cafe to avoid waste, and appreciate the benefits of composting.
In the creation of the calculator, we at coolseats have been fortunate to have the good will and ability of an intern working with Sustainable House, Marie Neubrander. Thank you, Marie.