Bootle group secure thousands for their community garden

A local, green-fingered group have secured funding to help grow food and cut waste – all from their community garden in a Bootle park.

Friends of South Park in Bootle, Sefton, have received £7,985 from the Zero Waste Community Fund 2024/25 to deliver the Compost Creators! project. The Fund supports local waste prevention, reuse and recycling initiatives and is managed by Merseyside Recycling & Waste Authority (MRWA) and Veolia.

The food-waste fighting Compost Creators! project will see household kitchen and food waste taken to South Park on Balliol Road (pic below) for composting. The group will deliver food skills and cooking sessions to local residents, who will also take part in food gleaning and seed saving.

Chairperson of Friends of South Park, Nick Karstens, said:

“The funding is allowing our project to engage people into thinking differently about types of waste and how they can reuse, recycle, donate or share food they may have at home, creating and contributing to a circular economy on their doorstep. We want to introduce participants to the concepts and methods of preventing food waste and composting and to encourage small changes to daily routines that will contribute to long term positive changes in household waste management.”

The funding will help the project to train new volunteers, giving them knowledge about where food comes from, learning different ways to cook, preserving foods, increase the reuse of containers to store food, and how to recycle food waste through garden composting.

Merseyside Recycling — Photograph from The Great Pumpkin Smash Day (Sat 2nd Nov) at South Park, Bootle

Friends of South Park have just hosted The Great Pumpkin Smash Day for families and the local community (Sat 2nd Nov – pic below) where they encouraged people to bring their carved Halloween pumpkins for composting. For intact pumpkins there was a cooking demo and tasting, to show how to cook and eat leftover pumpkins. Another open day in August attracted 30 families who took part in upcycling craft activities and harvested and cooked food ‘on the spot’ whilst in the garden.

For the eight month long project, Friends of South Park hope to:

deliver 27 weekly drop-in sessions at the South Park Community Garden
host two community events (one general food waste/recycling event, one an celebratory end of project community meal for 30 people)
recruit 20 local households for involvement in community composting
help 15 people to attend a veggie glean/forage in partnership with the South Sefton Foodbank
engage with over 400 people

Nick Karstens continued: “We have made a big effort to include families and children as a target audience alongside our volunteers and individuals, to build a future culture of responsibility for waste. By the end of Compost Creators! we hope those involved will be eating a more balanced diet, will have confidence in teaching others about composting and recycling, and will have reduced the amount of food waste they were previously creating.”

Councillor Catie Page, Chairperson of MRWA, said:

“We are delighted to support this project. The facts show that on average we throw away an estimated 122,000 tonnes of food every year on Merseyside – that’s almost a third of the average general household waste bin. That includes millions of loaves of bread and litres of milk.

“Food waste is a big issue with significant environmental effects. Projects like Compost Creators can help people to recognise the impact of wasted food and hopefully save households money on grocery bills.”