Silas yard
SOIL: MUCH MORE INTERESTING THAN FRIED CHICKEN AND HIGHLIGHTS
A conversation with all round soil fanatic, Anthony, founder of Silas Yard
About two years before lockdown, Anthony was “desperately depressed” and had an onslaught of climate anxiety. Constantly, he was hearing problems and not solutions. “It would always be ‘we need to do this’, never how to do it,” he says. Enough was enough and in December 2019, the former hairdresser turned fried chicken vendor decided to make a change.
“I went home to Dublin to offload some things so I could start fresh, including throwing my phone away – which I threw out of a taxi window, the driver was a bit concerned.” He says. Having lost all contact with the outer world, Anthony began to dive into a new one. A world of learning about living sustainably. From chemistry right through to the biology of our own microbiome. From mycology to quantum mechanics. That continued for a long time. Then he hit something very interesting. Soil. Via mushrooms. “Everything started with mushrooms really: how magical, how wonderful and how unknown they are. But soil completely blew my mind.” Anthony set on the task of trying to create a city soil cycle, because in East London, looking around, he figured waste was absolutely everywhere, and where there’s waste, for Anthony there’s potential. “I came up with a slogan:
‘Waste lays the base to create an entirely different place.’
Soon, he was doing experiments in the kitchen, using different microbes, bacteria and different fungi to break things down, just to observe what happened and the impacts that would have on different waste materials from his shared kitchen. “My best friend lived with me at the time and it was too much for her. But the results were amazing and I applied them to the garden.” With waste and all that, Anthony’s idea is to create something called the City Soil Lab. “Of course every single household and business has different waste. But it’s only waste because we view it as waste.” Anthony’s thinking is that we could actually build soil from a lot of this waste. If we (well, he) cleverly closed the loop, and found out exactly what each element of ‘waste’ could be broken down into.
“We could build soil that is endemic to the neighbourhood where the waste was created.”
From there, he’d put that soil into the neighbourhood to see what happens to the air quality, the biodiversity, and the accessibility of nicely-grown, fresh, local food for the people. The best part? In theory, it would be cheaper than what we currently do. “Where there’s a pile of shite there’s a pile of money. There’s a reason why every gangster is in waste.”
“In London alone, the food waste that we’re incinerating equates to about two and a half billion pounds a year. I was paying £22,000 a year on bins for Clutch [the chicken shop Anthony ran out of Silas Yard]. I want a slice of that, and I want the neighbourhood to have a slice of that” Anthony says. That aside, we already pay for our waste collection when we pay our taxes. So, he figures, why not still pay but have something profitable at the end? More soil, and more places to plant food and sequester carbon. But where in E2, London, would you be able to start a soil lab? Well, turns out, there’s almost as much wasted space around as there is waste. The council alerted Anthony to some possible spaces. One of them is a car park, not far from where Anthony lives, which has been misused for a couple decades. “41 car parking spaces, huge. And free.”
In Anthony’s opinion, “everybody in the city points the finger at farmers, says they should do better, but the reason we’re farming the way we are, is because of the way we live in the city. We’re never going to fix outside unless we fix inside.”
For now, ‘inside’ is a section of Tower Hamlets. There’s some businesses and some residents involved. As far as they’re concerned, they just need to scrape the waste in a bin, spray it with the solution, and shut it. “Easy,” Anthony says. The spray “uses effective microbial organisms which are quite similar to the beneficial bacteria that lives inside your gut. They make the process of digesting food about quicker than anything else that I’ve seen, and it gets rid of all food waste, not just vegetable waste: cooked, raw bone, egg, everything.” Adding that:
“The system of decomposition is much cleverer than we are all, it just needs a little bit of help. To be honest, as far as I can tell, the only thing that doesn’t know what to do on planet earth is us. Even seeds know what to do.”
To find out more, find Silas Yard online at www.silasyard.com
Or visit them at:
4 Ravenscroft Street
London
E2 7QG
