Prisons aren’t often sources of positive news, let alone innovative schemes to reduce food waste, but HMP Huntercombe is bucking this trend. By championing efforts to increase recycling and introduce more sustainable practices, Waste Management Shop Instructor Cathy Bryant has proved that reducing food waste not only makes environmental and budgetary sense, it can ultimately play an active role in rehabilitating offenders.

Oxfordshire’s HMP Huntercombe, like many prisons, knew it was producing too much food waste. Head of Reducing Reoffending Tony Reeve explains: “We changed from juveniles to adults and foreign nationals over a period of three years, and while adjustments to diets were being made, we realised we had to make much more to meet the dietary needs of a diverse population.” Attempting to feed a prison population constituting 86 different nationalities, without asking them what they want to eat, ultimately resulted in large quantities of food being binned instead of eaten.

Chips, for example, were found to be much less popular amongst the older inmates than potato wedges. Both are made on site within the same £2 per prisoner per day budget, meaning that the costs have remained the same, but waste has been reduced significantly. Reeve adds: “Whereas before people were eating less and throwing a lot away, now they’re getting a better diet.”

The prisoners are intimately involved in every stage of the scheme: they prepare 95 per cent of the prison’s food and constitute the bulk of the waste management team who collect, sort and process the uneaten food into compost used by the gardens team to produce fresh fruit and vegetables for the kitchens.

Educating an ever-changing population, who speak 37 different languages and for the most part have no prior knowledge of recycling, has been understandably challenging at times. This is what arguably makes the results of the prison’s scheme so impressive. Since December 2014, unprocessed food waste has been reduced from 2.4 tonnes to just one, and cooked food waste has been reduced from over four tonnes to just 0.7. As a whole, the prison now recycles 98 per cent of all of its food waste.

HMP Huntercombe has achieved this by utilising two complementary composting methods: a Big Hanna T75 in-vessel composter (IVC), and the prison’s very own wormery. Bryant explains: “All the uncooked, unprocessed food from the kitchen is processed by the worms, which is a natural process. The other process involves putting the food waste into a dewatering system which dehydrates the food, after which it’s weighed and placed in ‘Hanna’, our composter. You put it in one end, adding compressed wood pellets to reduce any residual moisture, then compost comes out the other end eight weeks later.”

The prison’s efforts have not gone unnoticed, winning it ‘Best Food Waste Initiative’ at this year’s National Recycling Awards. Bryant is understandably delighted: “Hopefully it will inspire others to see that they can reduce and recycle their waste for the wider environmental good and also because it is cost effective to do so. Hopefully our higher profile will assist us in gaining additional resources to further innovate our management of waste and we can explore new areas, such as our biofuels.”

Indeed, plans are afoot to compress compost into a biofuel with the intention of heating the prison sustainably throughout the winter, if funding can be secured. Ultimately, this will bolster the prison’s wider laudable goal of “helping prisoners, no matter what their nationality or religion, to work as a team for a common benefit and goal – getting them to buy in to recycling, so that hopefully they will continue what they have learnt here, and help increase global awareness as they return to their countries of origin”.

As media portrayals of prisons are often negative, Bryant adds: “It’s good to offer a positive [look at] what we do, given the challenges that we face.”