9 minute read
Close the circle
Food waste – Local life
How a Thessaloniki-based organization is promoting circularity and sustainability in Greece by working against food waste
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by Carolin Kretzer
When it comes to food, most people probably start to instantly think about eating their favourite meals or getting supplied with nutrients but what’s happening with the leftovers after eating is a heavily underestimated topic. With a share of 8-10% of all global emissions according to the UN, food waste is a massive contributor to the climate crisis, but also socially and economically, it’s a great loss. To tackle this, urban food systems need to be transformed into circular systems, but how can we archive this?
Κ λείσε τον κύκλο or “Close the Circle” is the motto of InCommon, a civil non-profit organisation based in Thessaloniki with parallel action in the capital city of Athens, which is working on the promotion of a circular economy through community activation. Its goal is to tackle some key-problems Greek cities are facing together by introducing the citizens, businesses and local authorities to the principles and practices of the circular economy. Contrary to the linear take-make-waste model currently used in western societies, this circular model regenerates both the environment and the people.
InCommon, which means Innovative Communities Onwards, starts at the local level and implements these practices by empowering communities, raising awareness while conducting research and developing replicable project methodology. In an interview with the General Director and one of the Co-founders of InCommon, Mara Angelidou, I had the honour to learn more about this organisation. Mara Angelidou is an architect engineer with expertise in environmental development, or as she calls herself, she is an urban sustainability expert.
Before talking about their projects to reduce food waste, we discussed their specific ways of solving problems and conducting their projects. As already mentioned, their solution to all these interconnected social, economic, resource and climate crises is circular economy practices. The problems we face are interrelated, and so our solutions should be. Therefore, instead of providing one size fits all solutions implemented by people not actually affected by the problems and focused on only fighting the “symptoms”, they focus on long-term solutions that include everyone and provide the whole community with tools to address interconnected problems simultaneously.
Source: https://incommon.gr/our-work/
Source: https://incommon.gr/our-work/
Something that helps them a lot to see all the multiple facets of a problem is their interdisciplinary team, which consists of people from very different fields of expertise. Together with the local communities, they explore solutions, provide them with tools & resources and keep supporting them.
InCommOn was initially founded in 2016 under the name “Filoxenia International” by a group of volunteers that undertook a lot of social and housing projects, but they expanded their organisation in 2019 to be able to address the causes of urban problems rather than only reacting to their results. Now they have several independent projects in Thessaloniki, Athens, Kilkis and Karditsa, all combined under the organisational “umbrella” of InCommOn. When I asked her about their projects against food waste, she told me that each of their projects has to do with how the community and how the society of Greece can be activated to act based on the circular economy principles.
One example of ICO’s projects is kaFsimo, a community-based project that collects used coffee grounds from 70 cafes in Kilkis and Thessaloniki and converts them into biofuel or compost. As a country known for its coffee culture, Greece produces 100,000,000 kg of coffee waste that ends up in the landfills every year. kaFsimo is a project not only aiming to reduce this waste but also to change the mentality of the people. Instead of viewing the coffee grounds as waste with no use, people can learn to see them as valuable resources that can easily be recycled and thereby form a circular coffee-drinking habit. In waste management terms, this is called “separation at source” and that is what kafsimo does; it trains the participating cafes, the restaurants and the hotels and achieves behavior change. The coffee ground is collected with an electric van from the cafes and the two bins located in the office of Kyklos in Ano Poli and the University of Macedonia, where citizens can leave their coffee waste. It is then transferred to Karditsa, a small town between Thessaloniki and Athens, where through the collaboration with the Energy Community of Karditsa SYN PE (ESEK) the coffee ground is converted into biomass pellets, which can be used in houses, local industries and public spaces for heating; the collaboration between kaFsimo and ESEK is taking place within the context of the European project BECoop H2020. This year (2022) they have gone to a nursery school to help them heat in this harsh winter we have in front of us. With this project, kaFsimo has saved more than 30 tons of coffee waste from landfill, which means more than 135 tons of CO2.
Source: https://incommon.gr/our-work/
While this is a really great achievement, an ultimate goal of InCommOn is zero food waste. For this to become a reality, the brown bins, which were only recently introduced in Greece, need to work properly. Until now, there are more often two bins used in Greece, the blue containers for recycling material and the green ones for all the remaining rubbish. Following EU directives, brown bins for separately collecting organic waste were introduced. Since this is “very new system in Greece and nobody is familiar with that”, Mara Angelidou tells me that InCommon is “trying to accelerate somehow the transition to the use of brown bins and tries to avoid the problems that we have with the blue bins, which are working for 20 years and even until now they are not being used correctly”. They have a specific project for this, called Close the Circle of Food, which is located in Athens. This awareness and activation citizen initiative focuses entirely on educating people on adequately using brown bins. This training that actively involves the citizens is crucial in making the transition happen because they are the ones using them. Providing brown bins is not enough: for the people it is also significant to learn that “whatever they have just eaten should not be wasted”; instead, they should see it as a valuable resource.
Another educational program worth mentioning is “FoodTreasure”. In this project, the InCommon team goes inside schools and works there with the whole community, the students, the teachers, the parents, the canteen workers and the municipality workers as well to create a different mentality on how we manage food waste through workshops based on experimental education. The goal is to get the people to know the proper separation and management of their food waste and minimise the food waste of the school’s cafes, canteens and by extension the households. Ideally, the schools should have their own compost in the yards afterwards.
Photo credit: Carolin Kretzer
Besides all these projects, they also have activities inside other projects that are not mainly focused on eliminating food waste. One of these activities was organised by Kyklos, InCommOn’s lab based in Ano Poli, Thessaloniki, and together with another volunteer, Steffi, I participated in the gastronomic walk. Starting at the office of Kyklos, we got equipped with a map, and from there, we walked through Ano Poli, visiting all the restaurants and cafes Kyklos is cooperating with and trying their food made out of food waste that otherwise would have been thrown away. Everyone brought their lunch boxes, and we had a great time trying the food they created, ranging from dry bread turned into Croûtons and tomato balls to carrot cake and bruschetta. From what I have seen, all the people participating and the people working in the restaurants enjoyed the walk a lot, so I asked Mara Angelidou “How is the response of the people, especially in the neighbourhood of Ano Poli?”
I can tell you that all the different cases exist. We have people that are super eager, we have people that really believe there is no point in doing anything because this isn’t something that will change the world, we have people that laugh at us, and we have people that were super neutral but slowly slowly with our activities, workshops and sessions have started to be more eager in participation”. But, and this is something she told me is one of their biggest successes so far, they were able to build a community around Kyklos in Ano Poli. Since they aim to try out and investigate how a circular neighbourhood would function in practice, the Ano Poli neighbourhood was their biggest success. Due to the ability to address multiple problems simultaneously with different projects, e.g. Kafsimo, Kyklos lab and the activities for citizens’ activation, it was the perfect test ground. “When we say circular, we mean both on an environmental, social and economic level”, and this is something they could achieve in Ano Poli by working so closely with the people.
Photo credit: Carolin Kretzer
Finally, when I asked her about the goals for the future, she told me that “for the next three years we want to be able to see the CO2 reduction in numbers and also have numbers on their social inclusion”. I think that InCommOn perfectly shows what can be done if you work with this holistic approach to see all different perspectives and find adequate solutions based on the needs of the people. Summing this all up in a circular neighbourhood.
Photo credit: Carolin Kretzer
