550m3 of organic materials recycled

The Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show is over for another year. The largest flower and garden show in the Southern Hemisphere takes 10 days to build, is on display for 5 days and then it takes 4 days to pull down.

Every year questions are asked as to where all the garden displays go to when the show is over.

So this year, just prior to the show it was announced that Van Schaik’s Bio Gro, was appointed ‘Sustainability Partner’ of the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show 2019.

With its highly recognised capacity and capabilities in organics processing the family was proud to be given this prestigious opportunity at the end of the show to recover and recycle the shows organic materials.

For more than 40 years, Van Schaik’s Bio Gro has been a leading innovator, working in partnership with companies and local councils to achieve optimum recovery of organic material. Recovered forestry material, construction timbers, agricultural bi-products, green and food organics is composted and processed into a variety of high-quality products.

Unique to the resource recovery industry Bio Gro has a circular recovery model. Bio Gro takes pine bark recovered from the timber industry into a process and compost stream and turns it into premium growing media. This is then used by the nursery industry to grow plants, it’s even used to grow new pine trees. The growing media is also bagged and sold into the retail market for home gardeners.

At the processing site the display garden construction timbers including pallets will be ground up and graded into garden and roadside mulches. Some of this mulch will be used in the display gardens at next year’s show. The flora displays from the Great Hall along with the soil and mulch from the outdoor gardens will be composted to create a horticultural compost used to grow fruit, vegetables and plants.

“It’s a great feeling to know that the end of the show is no longer like a demolition site, it’s now a resource recover site.  Thanks to Bio Gro, organic materials no longer go to landfill, 550m3 diverted, that’s good for everyone” stated award winning Martin Semken of Semken Landscaping after hearing the total figure.

With over 13 million tonnes of organic material disposed to landfill nationally every year, this is an important demonstration of the company’s endeavors and ability to reduce the generation of environmentally harmful methane gas into the atmosphere.

What a great result for the environment and a great result for the show.