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The Big Green Idea is a British Council funding initiative. It awards five Australians a grant of $10 000 to finance a project that will help change behaviours and attitudes towards sustainability.
Image courtesy of The Big Green Idea
Winner Jeanette Martin, working with Mullumbimby Community Garden’s Integrated Green Waste Management Facility, is helping to play her part in the global effort to reduce carbon emissions by recycling organic matter to create biochar (charcoal which captures and stores carbon) and compost soil.
How do you plan to use the Big Green Idea grant? How will the prize money be helpful?
The Big Green Idea will assist in funding the construction of the biochar kiln and large composting rollers. It will pay for materials and the skilled inputs necessary to build a kiln of a size, efficiency and clean operation needed to operate within, and accommodate inputs (green waste) and outputs (biochar/compost soil amendments) on a scale useful to the garden and the community.
How important is community involvement in the success of projects such as this? How can such projects be successfully transferred into an urban community?
Community involvement is imperative to the success of our project because of the need of in-kind contribution, and the wide range of skills and knowledge that exist in the community. Results already achieved internationally are being resourced and further enhanced with our discussions, debates, trials and experiments. We aim to improve outcomes with new and improved techniques that originate from passionate people in our own community, which can then be duplicated and even improved on again, in other locations. Our integrated green waste facility will be compact and easily constructed in an urban locality. Green waste is a readily available resource in cities and country environments and is the core input of our project.
There is potential for biochar to become a wide spread technology for climate mitigation and soil fertility on many scales from small properties, community gardens and farms, to large waste management facilities. Our project will demonstrate the small-scale application, which can be showcased and promoted via media interest to other communities.
What kind of behavioural changes do you hope to inspire in people through the project?
Education about the relationships between using waste as a resource, biochar, composting and climate change will create behavioural changes as people of all ages are awakened to the fact that we need to re-evaluate the conventional systems that we have been using to manage agriculture against the long term benefits of organic, natural systems including biochar and composting.
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