When Amy Carrad was growing up in the Blue Mountains, the last thing she expected to win an award for one day was sorting through other people’s rubbish!

Yet that’s exactly what happened.

In 2022, Amy relocated to Canberra to work as a researcher at the Australian National University (ANU) in food systems governance.

In 2024, she began trading her academic lens for a pair of gloves, sorting through the often-contaminated recycling of her Braddon apartment complex.

And this July, after raising over $8,000 for the Inner Street North Pantry Network with a couple of like-minded neighbours in her Braddon apartment complex, she landed an award that she wasn’t even trying to win.

The simple project involves Amy and her neighbours regularly donning their gloves to sort through their apartment building’s recycling to locate and donate bottles and cans via the ACT Container Deposit Scheme, and sending their earnings straight to the pantry network.

It is one of seven winners of the inaugural Green Grant Program from CHU, Australia’s largest strata insurance underwriting agency, and shares $50,000 awarded to resident-led sustainability initiatives nationally.

“These projects are proof of what strata communities can achieve when residents come

together with a shared goal,” said Kimberley Jonsson, Chief Executive Officer of CHU.

Ms Carrad says she has long been obsessed with, “ideal or perfect waste streams”.

However, it was the theft of some of her neighbours’ ‘Hello Fresh’ boxes that inspired the intersection of this passion with data she unearths daily at work regarding the state of Australia’s food security.

“Some of my neighbours were having their ‘Hello Fresh’ food boxes stolen,” she said.

“So, I thought that if we could put money into the food pantries in our area, there is more food that people can obtain without stealing.”

Amy realised that the statistics that “one in eight households don’t have enough food to eat” represented real people living in her neighbourhood, and she could do something to help them.

All container deposit proceeds go straight to the pantry network, funding fresh fruit and vegetables for people in need, and Amy’s share of the CHU grant funding will go towards the purchase of dedicated bins for collecting her building’s bottles and cans.

“With proper bins…it will inspire people to out only the right things in them!”, says Ms Carrad.

Until now, she and her little team of waste warriors, have been lining boxes with old bed sheets to collect the juice.

However, Ms Carrad says this often leaves them with the sticky problem of having to remove last night’s leftover chicken curry scraps!

Whilst Ms Carrad is grateful that they can assist those struggling to eat via supporting food relief programs, she believes that with the right food security policies, an abundant country like Australia shouldn’t need them.

“Food relief programs should not exist, and people who work in those organisations would say the same thing,” she says.

The solution?

As part of her job, Ms Carrad has been reviewing submissions to the Dept of Agriculture’s National Food Security Strategy.

She says that these submissions include innovative strategies to urgently address what Ms Carrad says is a “…sad indictment on Australia”, and that many of the organisations making submissions are calling for food to be “…recognised as a fundamental human right.”

“Which it is,” says Ms Carrad. “And an issue we can all do something about.”

However, until more solutions are found, Ms Carrad will be in the lobby with her gloves, turning trash into dinner for those who need it most.