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Soil Trust (泥玩: 集「棄」還田)2021-2025 ‧ Intersectoral alliance for regenerating farmland with food waste.
Soil Trust tackled the organic waste problem in Hong Kong at the source. As societal-led, strategic design researchers, we created a collaboration model that connects waste producers directly with local farmers. This industry-community alliance encourages the diversion and recycling of food waste to cut carbon emissions without costly infrastructure. Over its two years of operation, Soil Trust linked a hotel, a retailer, a local farm, and vulnerable communities. It provided a proof-of-concept to upcycle food waste and improve soil by distributing land care tasks, supporting regenerative farming, enhancing skilling opportunities, and integrating diverse communities. Soil Trust turned organic waste into a social proposition by engaging over 60 people from the agriculture, service, and welfare sectors. The Soil Trust model turned 5 tons of organic waste into compost, produced 1500 kg of crops, and helped feed 50 families. It also cut 500 kg of greenhouse gas emissions by keeping waste out of landfills and the atmosphere.Soil Trust's Cantonese name 泥玩: 集「棄」還田 means ‘come and play with the soil: collect the discarded for return to the field.’ The character for ‘discarded’「棄」is a Cantonese pun, matching pronunciation with「氣」(Jyutping: hei3; Mandarin: ch’i4), meaning ‘vital energy.’
Logistic setup of the Soil Trust nutrient cycling service. The source-separated waste diversion targeted the regeneration of soil biodiversity: fruit peel brew destined to soil microbial life, ground eggshells to Calcium supplementation, and pickled kitchen scraps to soil organic matter. The hotel collected kitchen scraps inter-layered with a microbial carrier in 50 L barrels. The retailer’s customer households recovered their foodwaste with wide-mouth containers of various sizes.Our research focuses on creating pathways to connect organic waste producers with parties that can utilize the waste. These links are essential for a two-part upcycling strategy that is not only recovering resources but is also regenerative for people and the environment. First, it involves collecting food waste right at the source in household or industry kitchens to return clean organic matter to local farms. Second, it uses fermentation to stop uncontrolled rotting and boost soil health and carbon capture. In Hong Kong, 35% of carbon emissions come from waste decomposing in landfills, incinerators, or biodigesters. Therefore, finding inventive ways to return 3,500 tons of daily organic waste to the land is crucial. Moreover, local farms import 90% of their fertilizer while their produce is too expensive for low-income communities.The profound disconnects in Hong Kong’s food system have motivated us to create the Soil Trust industry-community alliance. This collaborative model focuses on teamwork across the different sectors to change production as well as consumption practices, reuse local resources, and improve soil health. We connected hotel kitchens, food retailers, and local farms to support ecological and social renewal. Two main research questions have guided this effort in building a socially coordinated response for tackling organic waste. First, how does design for teamwork in non-ideal settings relate to creating shared value, recognition, and equality? Second, how can such collaborative design reach across different sectors to encourage groups – that have separate goals – to keep working together, and what does this mean for shared responsibilities and norms? |
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Soil Trust was a community/industry waste-cycling alliance whereby an organic farm offered a fallow plot for agro-ecological experimentation, a hotel with corporate backing sponsored the operation, and the university engaged villagers, underprivileged and students to coordinate the capacity-building involved.
To realize Soil Trust's full potential and attract external investment, our research team created a pitch deck for corporate funders that successfully advocated for collective fermentation practices to recover hotel food waste, highlighting both the immediate and durational ecosystemic benefits compared to conventional food waste scenarios.
The hotel's hygiene manager and chef de cuisine collecting kitchen scraps across their five kitchens and inter-layering it with microbial carrier bedding produced by the farm studio volunteers.
A cohort of 30 farm volunteers organised into small workgroups joined once weekly, either on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday mornings to assist in composting, microbial bedding generation and crop cultivation whilst learning regenerative practices and gaining access to fresh harvest.
The core farm team consisted of immigrant women who brought agricultural knowhow from their home regions and regularly advised the farm manager (second from right). Here, members debate how to plant potatoes while minimizing soil disturbance and mechanical footprint.
Volunteers were invited to sense soil through gustatory sensing to taste the emergence of trace minerals at comparative blind tastings of the harvest and remove air pockets during microbial bedding (Bokashi) preparation with proprioception in addition to participatory citizen science.
Equipment that supports nourishing and respiration of multiform life: broadfork rake to infuse oxygen to the soil, fermentation compressor to control airflow in fermentation, chicken wire enclosure with aeration pipe for breathing compost, sheet-mulch cardboards to moderate soil temperature, and Black Soldier Fly micro-farm to use excess fertilizer.
The farm volunteers were asked to join the Growers Without Borders WhatsApp group which provided all involved the opportunity to understand what was unfolding when they were not present and share their delights and issues encountered.
Soil Trust hosted The Farm Studio, a work-integrated learning program for bachelor design students who became trainees in regenerative farming for evaluating what design intervention they wanted to explore that can support the overall operation.
In November 2022, design students represented Soil Trust with a showcase at the Zero-Waste Festival organised by Green Hospitality at the Central Market Hong Kong to promote the landfill-free food & beverage industry.
Dance performance artist and her crew turning the Soil Trust plot into a stage for a terrestrial birthing ritual as part of an experimental film project.
Sadly, Soil Trust's borrowed plot was sold to a property development company that converted the agriculturally zoned land into a dump for construction rubble. It made all involved painfully aware of the divergent priorities and power dynamics at play.
Underpinning Soil Trust's research was the Ecologies of Participation (EoP) framework for exploring connections across different societal sectors by turning challenges into shared goals for then coordinating given logistics and building partnerships. |
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To address these questions, as research facilitators we used a method called Research-through-Design (RtD), which alternates intervention with reflection. They evaluated their work using the Ecologies of Participation (EoP) framework. The research explored connections across different societal sectors by turning challenges into shared goals for then coordinating given logistics and building partnerships [1]. With support from the PolyU Research Institute of Future Food (RiFood), the researchers launched a call-to-task in April 2021 for taking organic waste as an opportunity to build soil health. They did this by visiting farmers, biotech startups, food retailers, and the hospitality industry. In this effort, low-impact fermentation became a key practice that guided how industrial and household kitchens could upcycle their food waste [2].The dialog coming out of this design research inspired a veteran farmer from Hong Miu Organics in Tai Kwong Po village to get involved. He offered his unused, fallow land for free to test the conversion of food waste into fertilizer for growing crops. This opportunity led TinYeah, a local vegetable retailer linked to Hong Miu Organics, to utilize their empty distribution trucks to return food waste from their customers to the land. As a result, 15 TinYeah customers started recycling food waste at home, which helped improve practices for recovering, fermenting, storing, and applying the waste. This year-long, participatory design process showed that the involvement of diverse communities is crucial. It helps circulate the workload, produce enough fertilizer, support the farm team, and make caring for the land a prosocial experience [3]. To fully develop the potential of Soil Trust, researchers started collaborating with the Support Service Centre for Ethnic Minorities near Tai Kwong Po village, the Hyatt Centric Victoria Harbour Hotel, and the Zero Foodprint Asia eco-hospitality foundation. This led to establishment of the Growers Without Borders social enterprise sponsored by the hospitality partners. In return, Soil Trust processed the hotel’s food waste into compost and cultivate crops. By simultaneously distributing food to vulnerable communities and improving soil health for carbon capture, this industry-community alliance supported personal, urban and rural development [4].
References to the research:
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Soil Trust turned soil health into a convergent proposition by creating customised directives for different sectors: Soil Service Techniques offered an upcycling menu for hoteliers, Growers Without Borders an upskilling program for immigrants without land access, and Belongs-to-the-Field a climate action journey for urban families. |
Details of Soil Trust's impact and knowledge transferResearchers conducted interviews among all 60 Soil Trust participants (winter 2022/3) and several observers (spring 2025). All quotes are from this ethnographic data unless otherwise stated.The research collaboration includes a farm, a hotel, a retail platform, and vulnerable communities. It has strengthened social bonds among and between these groups. It has also increased environmental agency among the individuals involved for which it received international recognition [A, B]. Unfortunately, in May 2023, Soil Trust lost its farm plot to land reclamation by an urban developer. Despite this, the industry-community alliance inspires partnerships between hospitality and agriculture for soil and food production in other parts of Hong Kong. The co-founder of Hung Yat Farm, who observed the Soil Trust case closely over the years, explains how the pioneering industry-community partnership helped marginalized, local farming gain public recognition and proved its importance in addressing waste as a societal opportunity: “Soil Trust has opened our eyes to how regenerative farming cannot be just about producing quality foods. It is essential to bring foregone material and social resources to fruition by replenishing both local soils and the social glue. From Soil Trust, we learned the importance of investing in working relations and upskilling across sectors to make laborious land care practices into a mutually affirmative proposition that brings people, enterprises, and the local environment into the same action space” [F42].Soil Trust extended regenerative farming principles to kitchens, retailers, and hotel for recovering organic waste toward a regenerative land care strategy. Businesses and family households here sort food waste and layer it at the source using microbial catalyst. The upcycling helps the farm ferment the organic material to make it suitable in soil regeneration. During its two-year pilot period, Soil Trust upcycled 2.5 tons of food waste from 5 hotel and 17 family kitchens for composting it with 2.5 tons of municipal mulch into 5 tons of biological fertilizer. From this, the Growers Without Borders industry-community alliance generated 1500 kg of quality crops on its 0.1 acres of farmland. In turn, the cultivated vegetables and fruits supplemented the food needs of 50 families through community harvesting and food aid donations. By designing intersectoral circularity that promotes farming practices focused on soil health principles—such as closed nutrient loop, no-till farming, cover cropping, and crop rotation—the organic content of the soil is enhanced, which supports diverse microbial activity. Such invigoration of soil health not only eliminates food-borne pathogens but also activates carbon capture in arable land and thus reduced 500 kg of greenhouse gas emissions. Healthy soil in regenerative land care becomes a resilient buffer zone that saves on irrigation water use, withstands weather extremes, and prevents environmental pollution from nutrient runoff.The traditional fermentation practices integrated at kitchens and industries essentially pickle the food waste. This stabilization process makes the ferment easy to store for months or years without a fridge or unpleasant smells. It reduced the transport frequency between the hotel or customers and the farm. It also motivated drivers to use their empty back-haul trucks to carry the filled fermentation containers. In effect, the collectivized application of fermenting food waste has strengthened ties between industry, community, and region: “What we produced together was a collective action. It engaged producers, consumers, and even ethnic minorities in making a difference by bringing nutrients back to the soil for regrowing food” —TinYeah customer [F32].Based on the success trial with nutrient cycling among TinYeah households, the eco-hospitality foundation Zero Foodprint Asia (Hong Kong) invited Soil Trust to a corporate-sponsored research collaboration between Hyatt Centric Victoria Harbour Hotel and Hong Miu Organics farm in autumn 2022. In this eco-social contract, hoteliers used fermentation to upcycle and cut their food waste by 500 kg each month while the associated farm work was adequately compensated. It led to a joint, multiform investment program between the hotel and the farm called SoilFeeders. The program paired actualized corporate responsibility with localized soil health for the overall wellbeing of society and the environment that was internally and externally transformative [C]: “If we show that a big, busy hotel can deal with food waste at the source, it inspires other people who have influence or money to help us grow this into something much bigger; our ESG manager likes that through Soil Trust, we do something more than just rubbish pick-up somewhere once a year.” Food & Beverage Manager (42) [D]. The codesign of food upcycling opportunities, including farm activities with 12 hoteliers and 20 hospitality professionals, has also increased workforce synergies, cohesion, and resilience: “Implementing food waste collection is just a matter of managing our time, but it didn’t put any extra stress on the operation; it’s rewarding, and the team enjoys the process and understands what can be done with food waste” Hygiene Manager (M38). In essence, the industry-community alliance made it possible to reactivate dormant arable land toward ecosystems design and services: “Soil Trust impacts our profession because it prepares us for the future when we must learn how to make underutilized resources useful again” Marketing Deputy (F41).The SoilFeeders nutrient cycling sponsored a farm management team and subsidized the Growers Without Borders service-learning program with 30 volunteers inside Hong Miu Organic farm [E]. Through the nearby Support Service Centre for Ethnic Minorities, immigrant mothers were invited to apply land care practices from their native countries, learn new skills, and in return, receive free access to land and harvest: “Soil Trust provides us the opportunity to connect with our common roots as ethnic minorities, who have a strong bond with the land but when you migrate to Hong Kong, it’s practically impossible to maintain” (F57). “In my country [Nepal], my parents and other villagers do not really care much about the soil, but at Soil Trust, I saw everyone loving the soil creatures, taking photos of toads, lizards, and earthworms; I find this the amazing part and want to learn about the soil” (F28). The Growers Without Borders program increased minorities’ confidence and pride in their food heritage, skills, and future: “At Soil Trust, I see so many people passionate about their farm work, and it inspired me to pursue my own dream and change my career” (F31). Growers Without Borders also provided welcome food assistance by distributing wholesome local produce to the underprivileged: “Since joining Soil Trust, I bring a lot of veggies home that I saw on the market but never bought, so my family started eating water spinach, and they like it” (F38). From recovering organic waste, 1500 kg of organic crops and edible flowers were produced, generating a total market value of HK$ 150K (US$ 20K), about one-half of which was harvested by ethnic minority members and donated to the welfare center’s food assistance program for families in need.Besides receiving ongoing attention from local media [F, G], Soil Trust continues to promote waste-generated soil health at public events. It also advises local farmers on eco-friendly regeneration strategies [H]. In collaboration with TinYeah, an exhibition and workshop week at The Mills Cultural Center in Tsuen Wan and a documentary screening with panel discussion [J] engaged 350 visitors in spring 2022. Upon invitation from industrial recycling enterprise FoodCycle+ and The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, Soil Trust facilitated a workshop for 50 concerned citizens titled ‘From (Food) Waste to Urban Carbon Sponging’ in July 2024 to apply soil health regeneration strategically in regional development. |