Loop in the media
The Design Files
Farm-To-Table + Back Again, With Loop Growers
Australia has a massive waste problem. We’re one of the most wasteful countries in the world, and one-third of all our household waste is discarded food. That food, rotting in landfill, lets off methane that’s about 25 times more potent than the CO2 produced by cars. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
A few years ago Alice Star and Phillip Garozzo decided to do something about it, and in their own private ‘war on waste’, started revolutionary local food movement, Loop Growers, which is gathering momentum and overwhelming support from their local community in South East Queensland!
Gardening Australia
Circular Economy
SERIES 34 | Episode 31
Costa visits two friends who are trying to address the problem of food waste in the hospitality industry.
Alice Star and Phil Garozzo have turned two acres into a productive growing space, covered with 86 beds each 20 metres long. Their patch sits on a bigger farm owned by Alice’s father.
Alice started helping her father with his hobby garlic crop about 10 years ago – without any plans for where to sell it! Alice asked a friend who ran a café, where Phil was setting up a composting system. The café owner said yes to the garlic, Phil visited the farm for a garlic-planting day, “and basically he hasn’t left!” says Alice.
The Regen Narration
Alice Star & Phil Garozzo on changing paradigms where we gather
I headed out of Brisbane this week to Camp Mountain, to learn about some of the regenerative work being done around there.
One of the outstanding places I visited nearby was where Loop Growers happens. Alice Star and Phil Garozzo, hairdresser and marketing graduate respectively, are its founders.
“One by One, I Saw Each of Our Buildings Get Crushed and Float Away”: Brisbane’s Specialist Growers Devastated by Floods
Broadsheet
They supply some of the city’s very best restaurants – Essa, Elska and Gerard’s Bistro among them – but menus across town are set to change as small producers such as Loop Growers, Neighbourhood Farm and Falls Farm count the cost of an unprecedented weather event.
ABC News
Farmers joining forces with cafes to put the waste from your brunch to work
These farmers say it shouldn't be a strange thought — that today's latte might be helping to make that vegetable bagel a few months later.
'Closed loop' growers are part of a movement working to make that happen, partnering with cafes and restaurants to use their waste to make rich, healthy compost to grow their next harvest.
But don't be alarmed, they're not using the scraps from the plate of your avocado on toast.
Instead they're repurposing organic 'yields' from the kitchen, like skins, peels, coffee grounds and eggshells.
ABC News
Queensland farmers' vision to transform the south-east into Australia's largest urban farm network
Home to more than five million people, south-east Queensland is one of the fastest growing regions in Australia and is soon to become home to the country's largest urban farm network.
The evolving community of urban farmers are taking advantage of unused spaces within Brisbane's suburban estates and on the metropolitan fringe to grow food for a hungry city.
ABC Landline
How one inner city couple made money by reducing food waste
A couple from inner-city Brisbane, who moved to a plot of land on the outskirts of the metropolitan area, began transforming the local landscape and economy.
Seeing an opportunity to convert food scraps into fresh produce, Alice and Phil made a fresh kind of waste collection deal with cafes in their local area. Instead of throwing out food scraps, the cafes agreed to have Alice and Phil collect the waste produced by their kitchens so the couple could then use the yield to improve the soil of their nearby land. That soil would help grow a wide range of food crops, which the pair would then sell back to the local cafes, giving diners in the community the chance to make their locavore dreams come true!
SBS
Taste of Australia
with Hayden Quinn
Hayden travels to Draper, near Brisbane, to meet a closed-loop grower who grows food for restaurants in the city.
Lightspeed
Loop Growers
Q&A with Phil & Alice, Founders of Loop Growers, a business designed to close the loop between food production, consumption, and disposal.
If you haven’t heard of Loop Growers, well, it’s time you got up to speed. Formed by a pair of passionate Brisbane farmers, and designed as a way to close the loop between food production, consumption and disposal, this is a business that’s working its way into every compost-conscious (or wannabe) cafe in Brisbane, including our friends at Avid Kitchen & Garden, Flock Eatery, and Hai Hai.