A small Taranaki startup is quietly solving one of the country’s least glamorous problems, the mountain of food that New Zealanders throw out every day, by turning it into rich, living soil rather than letting it rot in a landfill.
Green Loop, based near New Plymouth, is now collecting about 1000 kilograms of food waste every week from local businesses and processing it on a farm at Korito, just outside the city. The waste that would otherwise go to the tip, including meat, fish, dairy and processed food that most composting schemes will not touch, is instead fermented and matured into compost that goes back onto paddocks, market gardens and native forest.
The venture grew out of Sustainable Taranaki and took shape over the past year. It is run by co-founder and operations manager Mieke Verschoor and business support manager Sophie Walker, who told RNZ the operation now has about 16 businesses signed up since it launched in November.
The process is what sets Green Loop apart from a backyard compost bin. Rather than letting food simply break down and rot, the team adds microbial cultures to sealed bins so the waste begins to ferment on the spot. The half-finished material is then trucked a short distance to the farm to finish.
“So, already in these bins here the fermenting has already begun on site we then take it to our farm, which is only 17km away not 300km away, and it processes for another three weeks and then everything in that bin is fully fermented,” Verschoor told RNZ.
That fermentation, a method many home gardeners will recognise as Bokashi, is the key to handling the difficult waste streams that ordinary composting avoids. By the time the material reaches the farm it has turned acidic, which neutralises the bugs that make meat and seafood scraps a health risk.
“The fermentation also makes the pH very acidic so any kind of pathogens from your chickens or your fish or your meat has already been killed off,” Verschoor said.
After about three weeks at Korito the fermented waste is combined with carbon-rich material and converted into compost using a low-emissions composting method. The team works with Massey University to test the finished soil and match it to the right job, whether that is feeding a paddock, a market garden or a stand of regenerating native bush.
The list of businesses already on board reads like a cross-section of New Plymouth working life. The Novotel hotel hands over around 15 kilograms of kitchen waste a day. Window maker Altherm, Clelands Construction, a distillery, a corporate office and a clutch of restaurants and cafes have also signed up, dropping their scraps into clean bins that Green Loop swaps out at every pickup.
The scale of the problem Green Loop is chipping away at is hard to overstate. New Zealand throws away more than 1.2 million tonnes of food every year, the equivalent of about 237 kilograms for every person in the country, according to a national report released in late 2025. Households alone send more than 200,000 tonnes of food to landfill annually, and roughly half of it was perfectly edible when it was binned.
The reason that waste matters so much for the climate is what happens to it once it is buried. Food packed into a landfill rots without oxygen and gives off methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide over the short term. The Ministry for the Environment puts the waste sector at around 4 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions and close to a tenth of its biogenic methane. Diverting food into compost instead of the tip keeps that methane out of the atmosphere and locks the carbon back into the ground, where it helps soil hold water and grow food.
For Green Loop, the environmental case and the business case are the same thing. The startup needs about 100 paying businesses to break even, and it is aiming to get there within three years. It has been backed in its early days by the Toi Foundation, Pivot and Wild for Taranaki, and Walker has been through Venture Taranaki’s Power Up programme for new ventures. With 16 customers signed up in the first few months, the team reckons the target is within reach, especially as more hospitality and food businesses look for somewhere to send their waste that is not the landfill.
There is a wider shift behind the story too. Councils around the country are slowly rolling out kerbside food scrap collections, and a growing number of small operators are building the local infrastructure to actually process all that material close to where it is produced. Green Loop’s pitch is that food waste does not need to travel far or disappear into a giant central facility. A tonne a week, fermented in a shed and matured on a farm down the road, can quietly close the loop in one region.
You can read more about the venture on the Green Loop website, which lists the businesses it works with and how the collection service operates.
What do you think, should more New Zealand towns be building their own food waste schemes like this one, or is the real answer wasting less in the first place? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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