The team at Cordis, Auckland reports in the last 12 months, a silent but vital member of its team has been diligently at work, day and night, at the back of house, converting almost 100 tonnes of food waste from its restaurants and kitchens into water, marking a year of zero food waste to landfill at Cordis, Auckland.
Meet ORCA, a state-of-the-art machine that was installed in December 2017, suitably named after an ORCA whale. The technology is housed in a stainless steel container with a door into which employees can deposit food waste. ‘Consuming’ the food within the machine’s ‘belly’, the ORCA Interwaste technology simply mimics a natural digestion process that works much like the human body where the perfect thermophilic biological environment is created within the machine for micro-organisms to digest food waste and turn it into liquid which is carried away through sewage.
The ORCA system has other intrinsic benefits in that it eliminates the need to truck food waste and thereby reducing significant emissions from road use and composting, reducing overall landfill and creating overall long term savings.
Franz Mascarenhas, Managing Director at Cordis, Auckland shares, “We have prioritised waste minimisation and diversion of organic wastes to landfill as a major operational focus. All departments follow a waste management hierarchy policy to reduce, reuse, recycle and recover and all our food waste has been diverted from landfill, now processed onsite by the ORCA technology.
Cordis, Auckland is proud to be the first Hotel in New Zealand to introduce this waste management system which turns 1000 kgs of discarded material into environmentally safe water, every 24 hours. As the first Earthcheck platinum certified Hotel in Australasia, we continually strived to lead Langham Hospitality Group’s efforts to promote sustainability in our business practices and we are always looking out for innovative new initiatives to improve our efficiency and business practices.”
