Self sustainable zero waste productive home in Melbourne demonstrates future | Gardening Australia

our food system is the most destructive human activity on earth it doesn't need to be and to me the solution is where we live we need to harvest the water that we already waste we need to harvest the nutrients that we waste and create a food system that's a closed loop and living breathing buildings that are ecosystems to me just makes so much sense yostbacker has been on the show plenty of times he spent the last few decades bringing no waste design and food systems to the mainstream eight years ago we caught up with him at his zero waste restaurant i'd love to put a farm on top of an office tower in melbourne that's my that's my goal i actually want to show how much food we can grow with the waste that the restaurant generates i want to have a restaurant a farm a composter and you know use things like olive pips to generate energy and have a completely enclosed loop with a supermarket at the base people can buy the produce that we've grown anyway i'm working on it be good wouldn't it it'll happen i'll make it happen [Music] and now he's basically done it this is the greenhouse on the banks of the yarra at melbourne's iconic federation square the three-story house is just 87 square meters which is about a quarter of the average australian home but it has a big ambition to demonstrate a productive sustainable and no waste future it's a house that functions like an ecosystem packed with life the people living in it also happen to be a couple of australia's most talented innovative chefs the house is bursting with produce grown on site and they're serving it all up with some serious creativity welcome to the future food system our food system is the most destructive human activity on earth it doesn't need to be and to me the solution is where we live we need to harvest the water that we already waste we need to harvest the nutrients that we waste and create a food system that's a closed loop and living breathing buildings that are ecosystems to me just makes so much sense [Music] welcome here we are look at this place come in mate come in most people have a welcome mat and you've got this wall of mushrooms as a focus point what's going on here well it's kind of utilizing waste that every person already creates so it's uh capturing the water from the hot water surface which normally goes down the drain plus also the steam from the shower is pumped into the mushroom it's pretty pretty amazing so this is a mush room yes every house should have a mushroom a bathroom and a bedroom that's so good check this one out this is actually really cool it's an australian native mushroom and we call it snowflake but a friend found it on a bush walk in emerald and he's grabbed a little bit of the mycelium and started growing it this one's lion's mane so i want to show you what we're growing them on because it's actually regarded as waste you know coffee grounds sawdust straw i mean look how beautiful that is but um it basically just transforms sawdust into this incredible material that we then embed into the soil when i design zero-waste systems i always start at the end and then work my way back to the beginning and that's how you design waste out there's no point designing something at the end going on what do i do with this every single element becomes a food source or becomes nourishing for another element which is just like nature as we go upstairs we pass another two systems that provide food and cut out waste aquaponics the nutrients from the fish waste feeds the plants growing up top the plants then clean the water which flushes back into the fish tank it's a closed loop up on the top level they're a rainbow trout oh yeah this is a beautiful one about 30 native yabbies look at this one [Music] you actually want to stop eating these things because you just fall in love with them and fresh water there's apparently over 40 varieties of native australian freshwater mussels and they can live up to 80 years and an adult will filter about 250 liters of water a day down on the ground level where it's a little warmer it's a tank of barramundi the barramundi are brilliant because they they grow so fast you can get a kilo fish in less than six months all of our fish stock are under huge pressure to get people to stop eating fish and turn vegan or vegetarian is going to be very difficult to ask but if you feed them a plate of the most incredibly tasty fresh fish like barramundi and say well this was grown here in the house it's a great alternative so i really see this as a solution so i can see that this drum garden bed system is is really the focus up on the roof i mean yeah my my aesthetic is industrial you know using materials that are often disregarded and they're made from recycled plastic they're food grade containers same reason that commercial growers grow strawberries and garlic in black plastic to heat the soil the soil gets warmer at the start of the day and stays warm longer and they're the perfect wicking bed so you don't lose any nutrients you don't lose any water they're the ultimate zero-waste system whatever your water gets stored and held in there you get a downpour you don't lose any water you get a downpour you don't lose any nutrients all this amazing produce is harvested by joe barrett and matt stone they're living in the house and eating only what they grow they're even harvesting enough to be able to share it with small groups of diners what have you found surprising about living here and cooking and eating only what you grow i thought it was going to be quite a lot more demanding but it's actually a lot easier than going to the supermarket and trying to decide what to cook for tea we just go out the back and then the garden's actually guiding what we're cooking because it tastes so good because we're just picking it from the garden we actually don't have to do too much to it and people love the idea of eating things that we're cutting to order and um so fresh and just like when you cut a salad as you eat it it never tastes better like it's not been refrigerated it's not been trucked around it's not been handled by you know a heap of different people in the supermarket and then put on the shelf and then moved around and someone else picked it up and put it down you pick and eat and that's how like all animals in the world eat they don't eat the dead stuff on the ground they eat from a live tree or a branch or a berry so we're kind of mimicking that and it makes our job really simple because it's really delicious so what sort of other ingredients have challenged you i've been growing crickets that are eating all of our vegetable scraps they're a really important food source globally around the world in australia we don't really look at it as something that is a common food but we've made it into a kind of a common food so we've made a cricket bowl which is pretty surprisingly the crickets are delicious yeah but we've made it with sprouted chickpeas that we've grown in the garden dried and sprouted so they're really nutrient dense and really yummy herbs and veggies from the garden and about 10 cricket through the mix and fried it so it's great protein source yeah and it's it's not serving it for shock value it's serving it for nutrient and flavor value so falafel is something that is quite common and we eat a lot so by sort of putting an ingredient that's kind of exotic to us here in australia into something that's familiar it breaks down those barriers and it makes it um much more desirable for people to to get into it there are so many other inspiring features in this house that are just too many to mention like the walls made from compressed straw or the worms that eat polystyrene this place is all about experimenting and giving all of us a glimpse of what's possible [Music] this is not a compromise this is a much far superior way to live and i think that if we can inspire people to change the way we live means that we don't need as much land to grow the food that we currently do and that's what this is about it's about taking pressure off our existing systems and i really believe that human beings need to get to a point where it's really bad before everybody wakes up and goes we need to do things differently and i think that we're at that point there's a real call now to change the way we live to change what we do to change the materials that we use and that's something that i'm so excited by i think that in 2050 we'll look back at 2020 as the year where everything changed you

Channel: Gardening Australia

Views: 772,017

Keywords: Gardening, Gardening Australia, garden, gardening tips, gardening advice, plants, how to, ABC, ABC TV, joost baker, joost bakker, bakker, Silo, zero-waste restaurant, zero waste, future food systems, sustainable, sustainability, closed loop, closed-loop, future, greenhouse, fed square, melbourne, federation square, australia, matt stone, jo barrett, sustainable living, urban, urban farm, urban farming, how to grow mushrooms, waste water, reuse

Id: j335BTu_vFU

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021