A few years ago, The Green Business Network acquired a 14-hectare site in Wakefield, UK where they set up a facility to farm sturgeon eggs by using cardboard boxes. Many species of sturgeon are harvested for their roe but commercial fisheries have been harvesting at a rate that sturgeons can’t keep up with, and there has been a significant decline in sturgeon populations.
‘From Cardboard to Caviar‘ is a pretty unusual fish farming project but it’s a textbook example of ‘Cradle to Cradle’. The project gets cardboard packaging waste from stores and restaurants, shreds it and sells it to stables as horse bedding.
Once the horse bedding needs replacing, it is collected and fed to worms in a composting pit. When the worms are all fattened up, they are fed to the sturgeons who will produce caviar. Then, the caviar is sold back to the restaurants from which the cardboard was originally collected!
Cardboard to Caviar is one part of the ABLE project- Wakefield, which runs all sorts of sustainable agricultural schemes, training courses and workshops.
Katherine Hui is currently the Social site editor at Green Thing, a web-based public service in London that inspires people to lead greener lives through creative content.
Before this, she worked as the Development Manager at Social Innovation Camp, an organization that encourages people to use web and mobile-based technology to mobilise social change. She oversaw 300 ideas submission and helped build 20 prototypes – five of which have gone on to get further funding or investment.
Katherine’s came over to the UK form Canada in 2007 for an MSc program at the London School of Economics. Before arriving in London, she managed a small environmental start-up in Vancouver called the Canadian Climate Change Alliance.
Katherine is football mad. She is a loyal supporter of Arsenal FC, plays for Islington Borough Ladies FC and coaches for Gunners in Islington in her spare time. Her second favourite hobby is kite surfing and she can sometimes be found chasing the wind.
