Together wee can power
He's famous for cafes made out of cardboard and recycled vertical gardens.
But even Joost Bakker has to push the limits of what wee humans can do sometimes.
At this year's Melbourne Food and Wine Festival - forming part of a five year collaboration - one of the faces of sustainability in hospitality may make bigger waves than usual.
Or, more like, he'll garner attention for waves... of sorts.
The restaurateur plans to harness pee-power, with a pop-up restaurant powered for a year in part by harvested urine.
The Greenhouse pop-up will use both diners' urine and mustard seed oil to run itself.
"We're building a waterless female urinal, and of course waterless male urinals already exist, and that [urine] gets diverted into a storage tank that goes straight to the farm and then the farmer’s got a way of directly injecting it into the soil as fertilizer," Joost told Hospitality this week.
Features include a chargrill and woodfired pizza oven - run totally off the oil - in an effort to show diners that "there's no such thing as waste".
"Everything has a value," he said.
Joost is teaming up
with Dr Steve Cumming, who invented the dual-flush toilet for Caroma, to
build and install the eight urine-diverting toilets, including the waterless
female ones.
It's expected that 5000 litres will be collected and then trucked out to a farm in the Victorian town of Daylesford to be drilled into the soil with the oil.
And, completing the circle, pure mustard seed oil will be used to
fuel the cutting-edge generators that will provide the restaurant’s
electricity.
|