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The Irish Examiner - Green Island Article (October
24th, 2006)
traduire cette page All food waste gone
for €265 If someone told you
that for an outlay of less than €255 you could dispose
of up to 70% of your domestic refuse in your own garden,
would you be interested - of course you would.
The Green Cone is a solar-powered food waste digester
which takes all your cooked and uncooked food waste,
including meat, fish, bones, dairy products, fruit and
vegetables.
This eliminates the heavy sloppy organic matter from
your bin, leaving cleaner dry waste, most of which can
be recycled. It has the further environmental benefit of
disposing of organic matter at source rather than in
landfill sites where it gives off methane gas while
decaying, a major contributor to global warming.
"The Green Cone which comes from Canada,
is the only one of its kind in the world and will take
40% of your domestic waste, a further 30% is green waste
which you can compost and you can recycle the rest,"
explains Kevin Coleman of Green Cone Ireland who has had
a cone in his garden for more than four years and
distributes them here in Ireland.
The unit comprises a basket dug into the
ground and covered with a further wire mesh, plus a
double-walled lidded plastic cone which stands just 70cm
above ground. The solar cone creates a heat trap of
circulating air to encourage bacteria growth and the
waste is absorbed as nutrient-enriched water by the
soil.
Because the digestion chamber is below ground, there are
no smells and no vermin are attracted. Waste food can be
disposed of quickly - the cone can wire through up to a
quarter of a tonne of waste a year - and there's the
added benefit of providing a chemical-free fertilizer
for the flower bed or vegetable patch where you put it.
"Twenty councils in the UK are now using
the Green Cone," Kevin Coleman Explains. "Guilford
Council put the carcass of a 17lb turkey in as an
experiment and five weeks later it was completely gone.
They now have 15,000 cones in operation of a total of
350,000 across the UK."
Kevin has sold over 4,500 units privately and says that
the feedback has been incredibly positive.
The Green Cone comes with a food waste caddy and
accelerator powder sachet. On average you will need four
sachets per year at €5 each so the total cost per year,
after the initial outlay is just €20.
GOING GREEN: Cone lets nature eat kitchen scraps
Debora Van Brenk
Sun Media
December 11, 2007
You've heard
of backyard composters that convert garden waste into
healthy dirt. Now there's the decomposer, a backyard
cone that allows nature to eat the kitchen scraps you
don't. Residents of 22 rural municipalities served by
the non-profit Bluewater Recycling Association can
reduce the garbage they set out at roadside by getting
their own backyard Green Cones. "They work quite well,"
association president Francis Veilleux said. "They're
not a composter. They're a digester and they're really
good for kitchen waste."
That includes
meat and dairy products, and even animal dung, that
can't be put into traditional composters. Green Cones
are newly available to order, for $80, from most
municipal offices in Lambton, Middlesex, Huron and Perth
counties.
They're a
resurrected version of a product available locally in
the 1990s. Back then, the Green Cone was made by a
Toronto firm. Its disappearance from the market was
assured when a larger company bought it out, changed the
packaging and more than doubled the price at the same
time as subsidies to consumers dried up.
Now there are
Canadian distributors of the cone, Veilleux said, and
it's affordable again.Backyard composters sometimes need
coddling, he said. But with a decomposer, "you just dump
the material in and forget about it," said Veilleux, who
has used one for 15 years.
The cone uses
solar energy and naturally occurring microbes to
dehydrate, decompose and digest waste in a matter of a
few weeks. After insects and other bugs have had their
go at it, very little residue remains. "In the winter,
it slows down but in the summer, it just disappears,"
Veilleux said.
Because the
broad base of the cone is dug into the ground, with the
narrow, covered top above ground, it is animal-proof and
virtually smell-free. Most residents served by the
Bluewater Recycling Association pay for each garbage bag
picked up, so diversion to a Green Cone can ultimately
save money as well as being ecologically friendly,
Veilleux said.He expects the cones to become hot sellers
in the spring.
London
environmental services manager Jay Stanford only just
became aware the the Green Cones are back. He said
they're worth considering here as part of a review of
waste diversion. "This is something London is going to
take a serious look at." London is looking at a curbside
composting program to include material, such as
disposable diapers, that can't be placed in a
decomposer.
Veilleux said
Green Cones can be ordered through area municipal
offices or by calling the Bluewater Recycling
Association, based in Huron Park, at 1-800-265-9799.
Debora Van Brenk is a Free Press reporter.
E-MAIL:
dvanbrenk@lfpress.com
Tiré de/from
London Free Press
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