Composting at Dover hits the News!

Our long-running composting project at Dover described in earlier blog posts was recently featured on the Channel News Asia Website as well as on their facebook page where the video has received over 120, 000 views so far!

The project is run by a High School team as part of the Budden Composting Initiative started in 2012 following a generous donation to the UWCSEA Foundation. The daily collections of coffee grounds and fruit and vegetable peelings are made by Grade 5 students under the guidance of Junior School's Environmental Stewardship Co-ordinator, Nicole Kutschenreuter. The final product, a rich soil conditioning compost and fertiliser is used in our Incredible Edible Project in the vegetable and herb gardens. Congratulations to all involved for making this so successful a project, now in its 5th year of development and special thanks to our Sodexo team and Operations Department for establishing the waste separation system and continually working with the students to perfect the logistics.

The NTU Business students learn how to prepare the best compost mix

Many UWCSEA alumni wrote in to say how proud they were that UWC was featured in the news and following the article some business students from Nanyang Technological University were so impressed they came to see the process in action. As part of their Business course they are looking at sustainable solutions to food waste in Singapore and hope that their promotion of this will lead NTU to introduce a large scale system on their campus too. Hopefully even more educational institutions will adopt composting as one of the ways to address food waste, now that Dover has shown the way!

We welcomed the chance to share our process with NTU business students..and hope we have inspired other too

We shall soon be partnering with the National Environment Agency on a pilot scheme to divert our post-consumer food waste (the stuff that gets scraped off plates that we cannot compost) into a Biodigestion scheme that converts waste to energy for a water reclamation plant at Tuas. Plans are also underway to seek Government funding for our own Biodigester that could even compost our new disposable cups that Sodexo are using in the Heritage cafe.