Campaigners launch free service to cut food waste across Leeds

Simrun Punjabi and Husain Alogaily recently highlighted their social enterprise Compost-it during National Food Waste Action Week.

They launched the organisation to help households reduce their environmental footprint and for local growers to increase their volume of home-grown compost as an alternative to expensive, store-bought compost.

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The two University of Leeds graduates have a team of student volunteers, who help with the planning, organising and collecting.

They use small, portable caddies to collect inedible food waste such as fruit and vegetable peelings and skins, used tea bags and coffee grounds, eggshells, and scraps of bread.

They started collecting from Roundhay (in the LS8 area) on weekends and then added a round on Mondays in Guiseley, close to where their local composter Season Well is sited. Season Well is a social enterprise that encourages people to use local, sustainable food and cook healthy meals.

The next step for Compost-it is to start collecting from houses in Seacroft (LS16 area) on Sundays. Eventually they want to expand the service across Leeds and get businesses involved as paid customers.

Professor Jeff Grabill, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Education at the University of Leeds, said: “It’s great to see both current students and our graduates taking the initiative to do something practical that helps the local community and address climate change.

“Tackling food waste is one of the most immediate ways we can have an impact on the climate change challenge that faces us all globally. We are not only producing outstanding research at this University about what affects climate change but our students and alumni are taking steps to demonstrate they are prepared to do something about rising emissions.”

University friends Simrun and Husain started the service on the back of winning a Mayor’s Innovation Award for the 22-26 age category last year. The Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, set up the regional competition to award cash prizes to innovative companies with fresh ideas.

Both Simrun and Husain graduated from the University of Leeds last December after completing their Masters studies. They entered the West Yorkshire Combined Authority competition because they wanted to help address climate change.

Simrun did her Masters in Sustainable Food Systems and now operates from an office at Nexus, the innovation hub located on the University of Leeds campus. Husain did his Masters in the same subject and operates from The Impact Hub in Bradford.

Simrun said: “Our goal was to make food waste recycling as easy, convenient and accessible as possible for local residents. We were pleased with the initial demand from householders who were keen to recycle but just didn’t know how to go about it.”

Husain said: “Unfortunately, there is a severe lack of physical opportunities for people to recycle their food waste and we wanted to make sure that the service we created was completely free.

“Compost is also one of the most expensive inputs for local growers, so this seemed a great way of matching the two needs. We drop off the caddies which are easy to fit into a kitchen. Reliability is extremely important to us. We’ve collected every week for the past seven months, even on Christmas Day!”

Their team of volunteers include members of the Leeds Students’ Sustainability Consultancy which is a student-led initiative. Two of the volunteers, Orla Smith and Katherine Mustard, are both doing the Masters course in Sustainability and Business and saw the opportunity to help Compost-it. They carry out market research, look at financial projections and help co-ordinate the volunteers.

Katherine said: “Compost-it is a project that works well for us in terms of what we are studying and in matching our personal beliefs.”

To sign up or volunteer, visit https://compost-it.co.uk