Wise­ly us­ing waste has long been a strat­e­gy em­ployed by Louisea John-Browne, but her dri­ve has led her on­to the path of bur­geon­ing busi­ness.

Last Sun­day, the en­tre­pre­neur and founder of In­crease Kids Agro World (IKAW) post­ed a mes­sage urg­ing the pub­lic to be mind­ful of plant­i­ng prac­tices for the Cor­pus Christi hol­i­day to­day with the aim of max­imis­ing crops in the fu­ture. How­ev­er, in the present, she has cre­at­ed a new lane that not on­ly brings her prof­its but po­ten­tial­ly cuts the wastage of food and the coun­try’s im­port bill.

“I would have told the pub­lic; Imag­ine plant­i­ng in the same soil, year af­ter year af­ter year. The soil needs to be re­ju­ve­nat­ed, and that’s what com­post ac­tu­al­ly does. So you place our com­post in­to the soil, it re­ju­ve­nates your soil, and the end re­sult, you’ll get a phe­nom­e­nal plant,” she told the Busi­ness Guardian in a phone in­ter­view.

“In that video, I did in­di­cate the re­la­tion­ship be­tween Cor­pus Christi and agri­cul­ture. But just to close off with the com­post­ing as­pect, that would be it, in that you use our com­post around Cor­pus Christi to re­ju­ve­nate your soil, to get a bet­ter plant and of course health­i­er lifestyles,”

John-Browne has been push­ing for greater com­post use for over four years, but in the last four to five months her busi­ness start­ed blos­som­ing. Her com­pa­ny has been con­tract­ed by state agen­cies and restau­rants to col­lect dis­card­ed food items to cre­ate com­post fer­tilis­er for lo­cal farm­ers.

“We have been do­ing com­post­ing for about four years or there about. It’s a grow­ing trend. It re­quires a lot of ed­u­ca­tion. So the ini­tial stage of the busi­ness would have been ed­u­ca­tion. A lot of ed­u­ca­tion in schools, through camps, through so­cial me­dia, bring­ing the aware­ness of the need to re­duce food waste and do­ing so through com­post­ing,” she ex­plained, not­ing that ini­tial slow progress has be­gun to reap re­wards.

Her work has got the at­ten­tion of Ned­co, the Min­istry of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice (MYDNS), the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices, the SURE Foun­da­tion, Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd, Agri­cul­tur­al De­vel­op­ment Bank (ADB), Every Bot­tle Back T&T, En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­ageent Agency, KFC Trinidad (Pres­tige Hold­ings Ltd), the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture’s Ex­ten­sion, Train­ing and In­for­ma­tion Ser­vices, Mo­bile Inn, Rinn In­dus­tries, Tropimulch Ltd, Linkup Waste Man­age­ment Re­sources and TACS Ltd.

“We’re get­ting there as peo­ple are now ac­cept­ing what we’re do­ing as some­thing that is sus­tain­able. You know, it’s fu­ture friend­ly, and al­so to not just see it as pick­ing up waste from mar­kets and the streets and restau­rants and what not. As such, we have gained some at­ten­tion,” she said, adding that sev­er­al gov­ern­ment en­ti­ties some of the en­ter­prise’s ven­tures along with pri­vate stake­hold­ers.

“So gain­ing that sort of trac­tion from pub­lic and pri­vate made us aware that we are grow­ing and over­com­ing the ear­ly stages of ed­u­ca­tion and hav­ing the pub­lic recog­nise the work that we’re do­ing.”

Her be­lief has brought her to a unique po­si­tion as her team is now not just get­ting sig­nif­i­cant work from the col­lec­tion dri­ves, but is al­so pro­duc­ing a lo­cal fer­tilis­er.

“There’s a lot a talk about food im­port bills and all of that food is com­ing in­to the coun­try. We have to pay X amount for that, and yet, a vast per­cent­age of that is be­ing wast­ed. We can’t pre­vent some of it from be­ing wast­ed, but why not take what is be­ing wast­ed and con­vert it now in­to a user-friend­ly prod­uct for our very farm­ers to pro­duce our lo­cal foods. So that all around the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my, all loops will be tied in, in that the food im­por­ta­tion bill could even­tu­al­ly be re­duced. The use of chem­i­cals could be re­duced. Food waste can be re­duced,” said John-Browne, who has seen a grow­ing num­ber of stake­hold­ers pick up on her pitch. Namde­v­co, she ex­plained, is urg­ing her to push the busi­ness to north Trinidad with a col­lec­tion dri­ve at the Ma­coya mar­ket.

She ex­plained this cre­at­ed a bit of a lo­gis­ti­cal strain, but she is hap­py with the over­all progress.

“We’ve hit a growth curve re­cent­ly, and so we’ve had to, as we call it, use the sling­shot ef­fect, pull back a lit­tle bit to move for­ward. So we’re now em­ploy­ing more ve­hi­cles, to get the job done. This would mean ad­di­tion­al work­ers to col­lect the vol­ume of waste that has been com­ing to us from oth­er spaces. We now need ad­di­tion­al hands on board to be able to con­vert, to re­cy­cle, the amount of homes that we are get­ting and well again, that would mean em­ploy­ees. That would mean trans­porta­tion, and a lot of lo­gis­tics, she said.

John-Browne al­so hailed en­cour­age­ment from oth­er stake­hold­ers such as Sandy Gopaul Badreesingh and Ganesh Kalliecha­ran, who helped her to pro­duce even more com­post fer­tilis­er pack­ages for lo­cal farm­ers.

“We were speak­ing about the fact that this is be­ing pro­duced lo­cal­ly. It’s be­ing man­u­fac­tured lo­cal­ly and sup­port­ed lo­cal­ly, so that’s im­por­tant be­cause a lot of the fer­til­iz­ers are be­ing im­port­ed, even if it’s or­gan­ic. So to have our own prod­uct be­ing cre­at­ed from waste, that is even more mag­nif­i­cent,” she said, adding “hav­ing the prod­uct pro­duced lo­cal­ly will def­i­nite­ly af­fect the even­tu­al food im­port bills and slash the use of chem­i­cals as well.

She said fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of the brand could help re­duce the for­eign ex­change us­age by lo­cals giv­en the mul­ti­fac­eted im­pact of the com­post busi­ness.

She said, “It would mean that every­thing that we do is be­ing done here. So as a re­sult, peo­ple can now pur­chase lo­cal­ly. You don’t have to look for the for­eign ex­change. You don’t have to go through all of the sys­tems that are in place for that as op­posed to just pur­chas­ing and sup­port­ing what lo­cal pro­duc­ers are do­ing. I think that it’ll be ben­e­fi­cial to the econ­o­my al­so by ac­tu­al­ly cre­at­ing jobs, gen­er­at­ing jobs.”

“I would re­al­ly like the fo­cus to be on push­ing food waste and cre­at­ing the com­post from the food waste. And that’s what re­al­ly sets us apart. That’s what makes our sto­ry very dif­fer­ent. Not just try­ing to push a fer­tilis­er or some or­gan­ic fer­tilis­er that any­body can use or get, but it’s ac­tu­al­ly re­duc­ing the food waste. “ John-Browne said.