Talalla Retreat

A complete and regenerative waste solution for a notable five star resort in Sri Lanka—educating, engaging and enabling locals to take ownership and manage their food and green waste streams on-location.

Andrew travelled to Sri Lanka in mid 2017, and spent over 6 weeks in at the widely renowned Talalla Retreat, on the southern coast, in the tropical Sampaya House area in Talalla.

Working closely with the locals and staff at Talalla, Andrew (joined by colleague and scientist, Peter Howard) designed and built a fully functioning and sustainable organic WastePlant (a grass-roots prototype for the tropics), to manage the resort's food and green waste. The setup includes a large format GardenShip with in-ground composting units, a 'Worm Farm Hotel', a custom made biochar kiln, and carbon management bays.

This is an ongoing collaborative project, which has allowed us to meaningfully educate and directly empower locals with a new set of skills, allowing the resort and local area to become more sustainable in practice, and ecologically aware and enabled.

This system converts two waste streams to a single high value soil amendment: the worms turn kitchen waste into high-grade fertiliser and the biochar, made from green and garden waste from around the resort, forms a substrate to hold fertiliser minerals and promote healthy microbial life for hundreds of cycles during its lifespan in the soil.