ISIS Report 01/04/09
An Urban Dream Farm for London?
The first community project in the metropolis to recycle food wastes into
energy and fertilizer by anaerobic digestion Sam
Burcher
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The organic muesli producer who keeps making history
Alex Smith has been made a London Leader of Sustainability for 2009 by the
London Development Agency (LDA). This appointment
by the Mayor of London’s office is a far cry from thirty years ago when Alex
was a squatter and started his food company Alara with two £1 notes he found
in the street. Alara now produces up to one hundred tonnes of organic muesli
each week, some sixty percent of UK’s total muesli production.
Alara was the first cereal business to be certified organic in
the world, the first cereal company to be Fair Trade certified, and soon,
if Alex has his way, he will be the first food production company to be zero
waste. Alex wants to make his mark as London Leader by using anaerobic digestion
to recycle food wastes into energy and fertilizer to support the first “Urban
Dream Farm 2” in the world. Dream Farm 2 (see final chapter in ISIS’ Report
Food
Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free [1])
is based on the circular economy of nature, in which organic wastes are recycled
into food and energy resources, thereby maximising carbon sequestration and
minimising greenhouse emissions and environmental pollution.
Alara’s food factory is on an unusually green industrial estate
just north of King Cross-St Pancras train stations and Camley Street Natural
Park, a wildlife sanctuary on the banks of the Regents Canal. Across the
road is the Elm Village housing estate and further down Camley Street is St
Pancras Old Church, the oldest Anglican parish church in London built on what
was originally an Iron Age mound. The church stands in a beautiful cemetery
garden re-designed by the author Thomas Hardy when he was a young architect
and where the poet Shelley is reputed to have first met Mary Shelley visiting
the grave of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. Johann Christian Bach, the son
of the famous composer is also buried in St Pancras Gardens which form the
grounds of the Hospital of Tropical Diseases and St Pancras Coroners Court.
A permaculture forest garden
Alex has already made a head start to the Urban Dream Farm. Over the years,
he has added to Alara’s eclectic environment by planting a permaculture forest
garden where delicious looking lettuces, bee hives, broad beans and about
one hundred fruit trees can flourish. The garden runs parallel with the railway
tracks and is an urban green corridor stocked with blueberries, raspberries,
elderberries, mulberries, passion fruit, pomegranate, kiwi, plums, pear and
apple trees that are starting to fruit. Alex has also constructed a large
pergola made of sweet chestnut and planted grapevines at each corner which
will eventually entwine and climb with blackberries up the wooden framework.
Beneath the pergola are stools and a table made of reclaimed marble where
outdoor meetings can be held. A large metal cabin which is Alex’s garden shed
is topped with a windmill to generate enough “live” electricity to read by.
He and friends recently serenaded the trees with song, wine and good wishes
at a traditional wassailing party.
Wide interest in food waste
The crucial next step is to install the first
community scale biogas digester at Kings Cross. “I’ve always been interested
in food and energy and I believe that the nexus point between the two is biogas
digestion,” he said. Alex has identified the various interested parties within
his local community to target constant food waste streams for year round recycling.
Alara’s next door neighbour is Booker Cash
& Carry, the country’s largest food wholesalers with over 160 outlets.
It is the land beside Booker’s warehouse that the first community biogas digester
will be set up. Currently it’s a tangle of brambles and a mature apple tree,
but it runs in a seamless continuation of the permaculture forest garden,
and so would fit perfectly with the green development
that Alex has begun.
Camden Council owns the land adjacent to Alara and Booker and has expressed
an interest in the biogas project that could potentially recycle
about 200 tonnes of
kitchen waste borough-wide per year. This would include kitchen wastes from
the local housing estate as well as food wastes from Alara and Booker, the
garden projects and other neighbouring food processors (see Diagram 1). In
addition, Booker collects huge amounts of vegetable oil from their food networks
that they want to recycle into bio-diesel.
Camden Council and Alex believe that a local community biogas project could
provide a waste hub which integrates the interests of around 120 social enterprise
schemes part of London Recycling Community Network (LCRN). A working model
of an urban community biogas digester recycling
scheme would provide multiple local benefits such as training
and permanent employment to get people off the unemployment register and into
green jobs. The education and employment side of the project would be co-ordinated
by the SEED Foundation and planners from the Council have introduced Alex
to the London Irish Centre, a local community group who will be participating
in creating vegetable and herb gardens on the land in front of Alara and Booker.
Re-shaping the land
Another direct benefit of the community biogas digester is the digestate,
which is the solid, nutrient rich, compost-like material produced by anaerobic
digestion. Alex is excited about the potential of digestate to transform
the quality of the soil in his garden projects and in local parks and amenity
spaces. He aims to put to put two tonnes of digestate onto the land around
Alara every year. This will sequester more C in the soil and increase the carbon
stock in the gardens and thus help mitigate climate change.
Alex plans to build a greenhouse over and around the biogas digester to
heat it to a constant temperature of around 40 degrees centigrade. At this
stage he wants to use materials that fit with the landscape and are sensitive
to the zero waste criteria. He is hoping to build greenhouses from recycled
car windscreens and may also use a converted car engine or generator to run
off the biogas to heat the greenhouses. There is also scope for a combined
heat and power system. The greenhouses would also be suitable for growing
tropical fruits such as bananas. Because this is a zero-carbon project the
central focus of the AD system both in terms of raw materials going in and
the energy coming out should be done without the use of any fossil fuels at
all.
Universal recycling and regeneration hub
The ancient and historic lands around Kings Cross fascinate Alex. “People
have been doing stuff on this land for ten of thousands of years,” he tells
me. Queen Boudecea is supposed to have lost her battle against the Romans
here. The old name for Kings Cross is Battle Bridge, which crossed the River
Fleet before 19th Century industrial development paved over it.
The underground river runs past the old church which is the second oldest
Christian church in the country; the first is in Glastonbury, near to where
he was born. Alex is keen to develop the spiritual links to his local environment
with sensitivity, boundless generosity and, I suspect, meditation. He also
wants to enhance the practical links between local people to make the Urban
Dream Farm 2 project more real and give it a sense
of place. The planting of the first inner city vineyard in Alara’s permaculture
gardens growing rondo red grapes will be made into wine and consumed by the Kings Cross Terra Madre Group.
“What can be done on a community level should be done,” Alex says.
Kings Cross is one of the easiest places in the world to visit and is home
to one of the largest Brownfield sites in Western Europe. Building the UK’s
first community biogas digester here would set the standard for recycling
food wastes into energy and crop fertilizer for a sustainable London
and be an inspiration for the artists, writers, poets, scientists, musicians,
environmentalists, architects, engineers, farmers, urban growers, everyone, for generations to come.
[1] Ho MW, Burcher S, Ching Lim Li, and others. 2008 Food
Futures Now Organic and Fossil Fuel Free, ISIS/TWN
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