Page 44 - TSWorkbook

Sign up for the Climatarian
Challenge

• If you have a smartphone or iPad, you could also sign up for The Climatarian Challenge, which helps you
to monitor the carbon emissions from the food you eat and gives you the challenge of cutting the average
Australian meat consumption in half for a month.

Set up a compost for all your
food waste!

• This is much easier to do in a home with a balcony or garden, but if you’re in an apartment and you’re keen
to set up a few potted herbs on your windowsill, then there are still some kitchen countertop composting
systems you can use that won’t smell and are pretty easy to use.

• If you have a garden or a lot of outdoor space, you can buy a compost bin from a hardware store, and then
add your food waste into the bin (provided you’ve chucked in a few layers of dried leaves, paper scraps
and a little soil first).

• Put an empty ice cream container or something similar under your sink or on your kitchen bench so you
get into the habit of putting your food scraps in there rather than the bin. Then periodically empty the
container into the compost. In there, your food scraps will rot, and start to look like soil and smell like earth
- that’s when they’ve turned into an amazing soil builder called humus. You can then use this to fertilise
your garden and have zero food waste! Neat, right? Here’s a step-by-step guide on setting up a compost.
Once you’ve done the initial setup, it’s pretty low maintenance.

• If you’re in an apartment, check out the bokashi composting system. It’s a little more expensive because
you have to buy bokashi buckets and bokashi mix, which helps your food scraps ferment, but is super
helpful for creating plant superjuice that will help your windowsill herbs grow. You still end up with waste
material that you need to do something with - but if you have friends that have their own composting
system, adding this waste to their compost will turbo-charge it. You can also bury the bokashi waste in
the ground, or look into providing it to your local community garden for them to add to their compost.

Tier 3: Ain’t no mountain high enough (Challenge level)

Grow your own veggies

Planting and growing food can be a much easier task than you think.

• Check out local workshops from the Canberra Environment Centre and ACT Conservation Council on
growing your own veggies.

• To start with you can also have a go at growing your own herbs, like basil, thyme, mint, coriander and
rosemary (and you can do this in an apartment too). To find out how, check out this article. You can buy
25L potting mix from Bunnings for about $10 to get you started.

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