FEBRUARY 2020
The FOOD WASTE MAN!
We had a great visit this week from Drew Binsky, global YouTube star and all-round nice guy. He’d picked up on what we’re doing with food waste here in Yangon after our TEDx talk in Yangon recently, and came out to our bokashi yard in North Dagon to see what we were up to.
Turned out to be a super nice day, and he captured brilliantly the essence of what we are doing. Love this video!
Read more: The FOOD WASTE MAN!
Bokashi Myanmar is growing!
A quick summary of everything that’s happened here at Bokashi Myanmar this past year — it’s a LOT!
We recently had a visit from our bokashi colleagues from New Zealand and Belgium, and they were amazed that we’ve done – and learned – so much this year. When you’re in the middle of it all you don’t always see that. Often we’re busy just working out how to move forward we forget to look back at all we’ve achieved.
Read more: Bokashi Myanmar is growing!
Our TEDx talk in Yangon!
Taking part in a TED talk is an amazing experience. This month we got to do it here in Yangon: Inda stepped up on stage and talked about what we are doing at Bokashi Myanmar and our mantra of “Organic waste is not trash”.
Months of work go into a TEDx event like this. The talks are written and rewritten, discussed, pulled apart, put back together again. And rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed. So much love and effort from the curation team, and all the other volunteers who make it all come together, magically, on the day.
Read more: Our TEDx talk in Yangon!
OCTOBER 2019
Food waste to soil in Ngwe Saung!
Last night the team returned from Ngwe Saung, a beautiful beach some 6 or 7 hours of shaky driving west of Yangon.
We’re feeling pretty happy, because we’ve started something there at the beach that hasn’t been done before.
We’ve helped stop the food waste at one of the biggest hotels on the beach. We’ve stopped it leaving the building, and we’ve stopped it going to landfill.
From now on it’s all going into big bokashi stacks at the hotel where it will become rich, organic compost for the hotel gardens. Perfect.
Read more: Bokashi at the beach
JUNE 2019
Last week we took part in the Food & Hotel Myanmar expo in Yangon, a huge event with hundreds of chefs vying to be the best. The hotels, restaurants and resorts of Myanmar were gathered in the huge venue to soak up the inspiration — get new ideas and make new contacts.
Watching these chefs at work was amazing! 400 of them were competing in the 6th Myanmar Culinary Arts Competition, producing some spectacular dishes. But not only did we get to watch, we were invited to take part and support them.
Our Bokashi Myanmar team was there from early in the morning to late in the evening doing what we do best – collecting food waste. We put one of our trademark blue barrels at every work station, and trained the chefs how to put all their scraps into the barrel. Maung Nan, Inda and Aye Aye from our team kept the process running smoothly, coaching them, checking the barrels, adding bran.
Read more here!
APRIL 2019
Happy New Year! It’s Thingyan!
Here in Myanmar, it is the end of the year. This week we start a fresh, new one — after a few days of water-soaked madness on every street in every town. It’s fun, and happy, and so totally liberating!
And it’s also a year since we decided to go all in and start Bokashi Myanmar.
Wow.
Last year, in the weeks leading up to Thingyan, our bokashi team ran all over Yangon and Mandalay meeting people, learning about waste and rice mills and gardening and local business and market needs. It was more than obvious the time was right for what we’re doing, so we took a deep breath – and did it.
Read more here!
FEBRUARY 2019
You can’t have missed that a 16-year old Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, is saying it like it is.
The house is on fire, she says. And it is.
Politicians, leaders, and everyone her parents age and up, have fiddled around for far too long, she says. And it’s true.
Climate change is no longer something for discussion, it is a CRISIS. And the days for doing anything other than fixing this are behind us.
Read more here!
JANUARY 2019
Our mantra is that organic waste IS. NOT. TRASH.
Every day it gets clearer to us just how important that is. The streets and backyards of Yangon are filled with trash. And the tragedy is that it’s the same story every you look. In cities, towns and villages in Myanmar, and in many other parts of Asia.
We’ve gotta do something about it.
Read more here!
NOVEMBER 2018
Our sandy yard is becoming fertile soil and our plants are growing, yay! Our project at Ward 67 is rolling on, we’re starting an urban garden there. And we have a cool new project with a local startup.
Read more here!
OCTOBER 2018
We’ve started a challenging project in the outskirts of Yangon. From waste to gardens — we hope!
Read more here!
SEPTEMBER 2018
We’ve been on three months and SO much has happened!
Here’s the full story of these action-filled weeks!
Read more!
AUGUST 2018
We’re on! We have an office and an official “bokashi yard”. That means you’ll soon be able to come visit us, see how to make bokashi from organic waste, and sit down with us over a cup of tea and talk about how we can help you get started in your community, project or urban farm. Looking forward to it!
We’re in North Dagon, an hour by bus (on a good day) from downtown Yangon. A nice, quiet spot in a leafy suburban area, just off the Bo Hmu Ba Too Road, just a few minutes up the road from our colleagues at Kokkoya Organics. The address is in the “About” section above, but send us a message to check if we’re there.
We’ve started up production of our bokashi bran and will soon have EM and bokashi available to sell. We’ll be arranging workshops in due course, so watch this space...
JULY 2018
As promised, we’re starting up! Hoping to organise our bokashi yard soon (so you can come and see what we’re doing), package up some products for sale and start our first projects. More info soon. Meanwhile, please enjoy the film we’ve made to tell our story!
Bokashi Myanmar — the film!
JUNE 2018
We’re starting up soon! Small scale, and we have a lot to learn, but as of July we’ll be in Myanmar and working to start up our projects in Yangon and Mandalay. We don’t have any official base yet (let us know if you know of a site that would make a great bokashi yard!) but we are onto it. And really looking forward to making this happen, at last.
Get in touch if you’d like to meet us!
/Bokash Myanmar team
MAY 2018
Bokashi Myanmar is up and running! We had a great response from our research trip in March and April this year, and everything points to bokashi having a good future in Myanmar. So we are going to make it happen.
We start for real in July this year. As yet we have no fixed location or products available for sale, but that will be the next step. We are currently running a number of test projects and these are giving us valuable information about how to develop our project. As far as the actual bokashi process goes we have years of experience, but in terms of doing bokashi in Myanmar many things are different -- so we’re taking it all step by step.
Follow us here on Facebook and on our website www.bokashimyanmar.com to see how it’s all unfolding. We have some interesting and exciting years ahead of us.
And please send us a message if you’d like to get in touch!
/Bokashi Myanmar team
MARCH 2018
In late 2017 we decided to start a project to help make bokashi part of daily life in Myanmar.
We’re a team of five, two guys from Myanmar (Inda and Dipa), and three women -- Diana from Germany, Stefania from Belgium, and Jenny from Sweden.
Read more: Why Myanmar?
Bokashi is all about making food waste, any form of organic waste really, part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Bokashi makes fabulous soil. And with healthy, living soil, you can easily grow nutritious fruit, herbs and vegetables -- even on street corners.
It’s still very early days for our project. But we’re getting it off to a good start now in March and April this year. The five of us are gathering up in Myanmar to find out answers to as many of our questions as possible. How and where are we going to run this project? What are the best conditions for making it work? How should we organize the setup and what resources and contacts do we need?
The need is obvious: Myanmar has very poor soil in the cities and food security and climate change are very real issues in this part of the world. Organic waste is on every street corner, every home, every field. Bokashi and EM are great methods, important tools for the future, and we have some years of experience in how they work in Europe. Much of that can be translated to any country; bokashi is already used in every country in the world, but the word needs to spread faster and far further than it is now. It needs to get real.
We’re thinking that education, hands-on demonstrations and a lot of inspiration and relentless effort will be the key to making it happen.
The challenge now will be to put all this into action, in a country which is one of the most marvelous in the world, but certainly one of the more challenging.
Join us on our journey!
/Bokashi Myanmar team
