We have different rates for households and businesses, and it depends on how much food waste you have, and whether it’s a collection or drop-off service – get in touch if you’d like us to provide a quote for your needs.

We offer a two-week free trial for all business customers, to help us to assess your needs and for you to see how the service will work for you.

Nope. You can always add more buckets if you need, or return some if you don’t need them, and we’ll adjust your rate accordingly. For businesses, we offer a two-week free trial while we assess your needs and you see how the service works for you.

We use the CarbonCycle Company hot composting system, designed in Auckland for the purpose of community-scale composting. Food scraps are mixed with other organic by-products and resources that we source from local businesses, including woodchip, wood shavings, sawdust, coffee chaff, coffee grounds, grass clippings, cardboard and more. If you are looking to dispose of any of these materials, or similar dry compostable materials, feel free to get in touch.

The finished compost is returned to the soil at Kelmarna, adding fertility and structure to our vegetable beds, and helping us to grow more local, organic food, and run our educational and therapeutic programmes.

In future, if we produce a surplus of compost we will look to make it available to our members and the public.

You are welcome to line your bucket with newspaper, or alternatively use a certified compostable bin liner, which must be certified to Australian Standard AS4736-2006 or European Standard EN13432-2000. If you’re unsure which compostable liners you can use, please ask us first!

Bokashi composting is an anaerobic process that relies on the addition of material inoculated with beneficial microbes to ferment kitchen scraps. The compaction and fermentation of the material means that you don’t need to empty your bin as often, and the material that you provide us with is already partially processed.

You can find out more about bokashi on the Compost Collective site, or by attending one of their free composting workshops around Auckland, where you can also receive a discount off the purchase of a bokashi system.

We have two collection zones for our Kelmarna Compost Hub and Francis Reserve Compost Hub which covers parts of Ponsonby, Arch Hill, Westmere and Grey Lynn. Check out our map to see if you’re in the zone. For business customers, we can sometimes collect a little beyond the edges of the zone – feel free to get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.

Kelmarna Compost Hub: Every Friday, between 6.30am and 3pm.

Francis Reserve Compost Hub: Every Wednesday, between 6.30am and 3pm.

You can drop off your bucket any day of the week, including out-of-hours, at your designated drop-off point (either Kelmarna Compost Hub or Francis Reserve Compost Hub).

Yes, even if your bucket isn’t totally full, you’ll need to bring it in to empty every week. Food scraps kept for more than a week are likely to start to putrefy – which means slimy, smelly food that is bad news for everyone.

Food disposal units grind your food scraps up and add them to the wastewater system. While a substantial proportion of food material is water (InSinkErator estimate 70%), the remaining 30% of solids then has to be screened out from the wastewater system, and then ends up in landfill.

Composting helps up to reduce climate change in two main ways.

1. Reduced emissions – By composting locally, and collecting by bike, we are reducing the carbon emissions that would normally be generated by trucking food scraps out of the city, and by keeping organic material out of landfills, we are avoiding the methane that would normally be released – when it comes to trapping heat in our atmosphere, methane is estimated to be 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide.
2. Carbon sequestration – Climate change is caused by an imbalance in the carbon cycle – we have upset the balance by burning fossil fuels, destroying the biosphere (through deforestation and more), and releasing carbon from our soils by over-tilling and the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, placing too much carbon in our atmosphere and our oceans.

Plants pull carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis and transfer a portion of the carbon to the soil through their roots. Soil microorganisms then turn the carbon into a stable form commonly known as humus. Compost plays a vital role in creating the conditions for plants to do this. Watch this short video from Kiss the Ground for a great brief explanation.

Degradation of our soils is mainly caused by over-tilling and chemical-heavy farming (amongst other causes), and poses a threat to our future as serious and urgent as climate change. According to the UNFAO, if we continue to degrade our soils at current rates, we have only 60 years of harvests left globally, and in many places it is much less than that.

Used alongside other regenerative practices composting is a powerful tool to help us to prevent further erosion and to create new topsoil.

Composting at home is often the best solution, and a great way to return fertility to your own garden. Compost Collective run excellent free workshops across Auckland where you can learn how to get started, or get help with resolving any problems you’ve had. We’re always happy to chat compost too if you’re struggling.