Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Nick Kiss was involved in Metro Vancouver’s waste industry for 14 years prior to starting Bokashi Living in 2013. 

“I was part of the change and the effort that Metro Vancouver was implementing in trying to create diversion strategies for the waste stream,” he explained.

He and his wife have been visiting Cortes Island every summer for years and now hope to find a home here. In this morning’s interview NIck explains why he believes in the Bokashi method of composting. 

NK:  “What always bothered me when I was in the waste management industry, was the amount of food waste that was being produced and nothing was being done with it. It was going to the landfill mostly, which  is a terrible thing to do with food waste  because when they rot they turn into methane which is a terrible greenhouse gas contributor.” 

“Any homeowner who does have a garden that they care about can stand to receive a great benefit if they deal with their food waste properly, and have a simple way to get it back into the soil.”

“I met up with two other individuals who were in a similar position, both with lots of experience and a little bit of time on their hands and a keen desire to try to affect change on a larger level  than our own personal lifestyles. We collectively decided  to make it our mission to try to educate North America on a new way of dealing with their food waste.” 

CC: How is the B,okashi method different from the way that millions of people are already composting?

NK: “When we're composting, any kind of composting really, we're just trying to be a steward of microbes. We're trying to create a home that's as attractive as possible so that the correct microbes that we want to encourage will come to it, thrive and do the work of composting. Composting is really just microbes at work.” 

“When we're dealing with traditional composting, it's the outdoor pile or bin or cone that most gardeners have in their garden. They're feeding that pile with organic material. The microbes  in that pile are aerobic, meaning that they want oxygen.”

"Our composting with Bokashi is anaerobic, meaning we want no air. It's a fundamental difference in the set of bacteria and the microbes that are involved doing the process. Anaerobic is also known as fermentation, which many people are keenly aware of nowadays, and its inherent benefit of generating probiotics, fermented foods and such. What we're doing with Bokashi composting is fermenting all our food waste." 

"There's a number of advantages that come with that versus traditional composting."

"The number one advantage in my mind is that you can ferment all of your food waste. No longer are we sorting or separating or high grading our food waste into just the vegetable waste, which most people are familiar with composting. When you're fermenting, if it's food waste coming from your kitchen it can go into your Bokashi bin: whether it's meat, dairy, bread or cooked food. If you can eat it,  if it comes from your plate: then you can put it into your Bokashi bin and ferment it." 

"The fermentation process is really just microbes doing their thing, which is inoculating that food waste thoroughly multiplying, taking it over even though we don't see them. That's what's happening." 

"When we ferment our food waste with these microbes, that food waste becomes very attractive to the soil ecology.  The biota that exists in our healthy soil, we dig it down into our gardens and the organisms that are in the garden will thrive off it and very quickly assimilate into the soil structure."