Oil' be outside, composting

I’m as averse to paying the price at the pumps for the diesel and petrol my cars take as the next man, but most recently my brand allegiance changed and I’d like to tell you why.

It was a chilly late 2008 morning and I was travelling my usual country lane route to work, I was doing my best to duplicate the stunning run through the Welsh Rally special stage 12 by Marcus Grönholm in his Ford Focus, only I was just that little quicker, when Terry Wogan (my co-driver) interrupted his commentary to let me listen to the 8 O’clock news. The headline this morning “Oil Company announces 13Billion Profits….” Only my driving skill avoided what could have been a triple summersault through a hedge and over the Timbersbrook Vicarage vegetable plot.


I can think of 13 million ways 13 Billion pounds can be spent. I was not happy.

However, it would appear that there are some very “Eco Minded” individuals in the big Oil companies these days, long gone are the days of JR Ewing, Bobby and Crystal investing the oil companies’ profits in new shoulder pads and Stetsons.

I’m quite happy to say, that I’m helping “JR” spend my contribution to his pump profits, on food waste recycling projects.

The task on hand for Rocky and the team - the supply of food waste recycling equipment to an Oil Exploration site.

This particular site has 6 smaller sites, each of these sites with a cafeteria or refectory that the oil workers eat at, the food wastes are collected from each of these six sites and transported to a centralised site where the wastes will be combined as one and composted. Excellent idea!

We spent a fair amount of time discussing how the composters would work for them, how the machinery would look, who they could talk to about their opinions of composting, the types of food waste collection buckets we would use and what we’d do with the compost afterwards. Everything was carried out by email and very, very briefly by telephone – as my foreign language abilities stop at being able to order a large beer in a German bar and ask where the toilet is after I order one too many.

The site for composting these food wastes? Georgia, as in - the Baltic State of.




When the order arrived at Rocky HQ, I have to say I was a little speechless. We conducted all investigation without ever even seeing a bucket of food waste let alone a handful of compost. This was no small composter either.

The amount of trust bestowed upon my investigation and correspondence was huge. But they have taken me at my word and gone with the idea.

Now I’ve changed brand of Petrol and diesel, I know it all comes from the same place, but I buy slightly happier in the knowledge that this time my money might be going someway to helping repair some of the damage we’ve done to this very precious planet.

As a parting comment, if this can be envisaged, organised and implemented, in possibly the last place on earth you’d expect, why the heck isn’t more of it happening here at home?

Rocky