The seat of our plants

An environmental lawyer turned activist is installing street furniture in inner-suburban Sydney that discreetly turns food waste into compost

Michael Mobbs has a big dream: “I want to end cafe and residential food waste in Chippendale by 2024.” An environmental lawyer turned water activist and street gardener, Mobbs is bringing change to the streets of the inner-Sydney suburb that has been his home since 1978. His activism ranges from writing a potent clause into a state water policy, to building a landmark inner-city sustainable house and developing a container that turns local food waste into soil in three to five weeks.

“If you want to bring change, you need follow-through and persistence,” he says. “You’ve got to stick to it. This ‘she’ll be right’ attitude is wrong. She will not be right.”

We’re sitting in a cafe near Mobbs’ “Sustainable House”, a radically converted 19th century terrace. It’s a cool spring morning and he’s wearing a knitted beanie and an old sweater. Despite his stated ambition, Mobbs has a winning way with self-deprecation. I soon discover it’s a manner that he’s spent a lifetime perfecting, perhaps due to a childhood illness that forced him to wear a calliper in primary school. This taught him how to survive bullies and gave him time to read a book a day. He’s like one of those TV detectives who seem to be innocuous and just moseying around, but are actually shrewd, determined and fiercely intelligent. When required, Mobbs is also combative, and well practised in wielding the law to challenge authority.

But today we’re here to talk about his latest endeavour: community composting.

“I guess after my first love, which is water, my next thing is decay,” he says.

His latest innovation is a streetside composting system known as a “coolseat”, which is designed to keep local food waste local, here in the most inhospitable of environments: a densely built suburb near the CBD with tiny gardens, courtyards and balconies at best, and a record-setting scarcity of green public space per person.

The coolseat looks like a raised garden bed with soil and plants fringing a wooden bench. This bench seats two to three people, and is also a hinged lid covering containers for the food scraps deposited by local residents. The food breaks down naturally, helped by worms and regular turning for aeration by Mobbs and his team of interns and local volunteers. The seats are fully ventilated so there’s no odour. The compost they produce helps to improve soil health and increase tree canopy, and the plants cool the footpath and provide food and herbs.

The idea is ingenious and necessary, and also lovely: community compost bins dressed as sweet-smelling wooden benches surrounded by flowers. I ask Mobbs if he’s seeking government backing with a view to legislative change and funding to install them at scale.

“I don’t have time,” he says. “I’m just going to do it.”

After his years in law and local council, Mobbs prefers to act locally and as independently as possible. He now manages the coolseats as part of a social business that donates half its profits to regeneration projects. But he initially developed the seats in partnership with sustainability expert John Fry, the NSW Environment Protection Authority and #lovefoodhatewastensw, as part of a trial to end cafe food waste. Mobbs and Fry designed and built the coolseats, and in 2019 installed five in Chippendale and five in rural towns in and around Bathurst. The trial was completed in March 2022.

Mobbs says the initial plan to send Chippendale compost to Bathurst was inefficient.

“The only way we’re going to get change done in our time remaining is to use citizens, not governments,” he says. “We don’t have time for all the approvals. One of the most common phrases I hear is, ‘Have you got approval?’ When I say no, you can see them shrink a bit because they don’t know whether I’m verging on criminality or something similarly dangerous. We are not a free larrikin society.”

But thanks to his childhood on the land, Mobbs retains a larrikin streak. He grew up on a farm in central western New South Wales, where the regular flooding of the Lachlan River taught him a lot about unpredictability, improvisation, and the power and beauty of water.

His love of water drove his self-described “rebirth” in the 1990s. After a career as an environmental lawyer – which got off to a brilliant start when he successfully sued seven uranium mining companies in his 20s – he left the law to become a consultant. When the NSW government effectively ignored a report he contributed to, as part of a 1993–94 state parliamentary inquiry into Sydney Water, and instead corporatised the water board, Mobbs ensured the relevant legislation and operating licence contained a clause that allowed anyone to disconnect from state water and sewerage.

“I no longer regarded the law as my best friend,” he says. “It was a temporary thing, only there until those with power changed it. The thing that I had uppermost in my mind was freeing us citizens from the monopoly control of the corporation.”

Mobbs immediately took advantage of the change: he renovated his kitchen and bathroom, installed water and sewage tanks and solar power, and disconnected from the water and sewerage mains. In 2015, he disconnected from the electricity grid. The renovation took three months, but he’d been researching it for three years to make sure it was foolproof – and that anyone could copy it.

“I didn’t want it taken over by engineers or lawyers. I wanted it so you could go to a local hardware store and buy everything and have it on your job the next week.”

In December 1996, then premier Bob Carr launched Mobbs’ renovated terrace as “Sydney’s first sustainable house”, which attracted a “tsunami of media”. Two bestselling books by Mobbs ensued: Sustainable House followed by Sustainable Food.

The focus on food had emerged when he and his business partner, a builder, won the tender to fit out Google’s new Sydney offices in 2006, because their plan included supplying fresh local food. As a result, Mobbs started growing produce, first in his garden and then in the street. He then launched a Food for the Future Fair to get more people in Chippendale planting.

“It changed us. People who’d never held a shovel planted trees. In Shepherd Street, the council officer couldn’t get the shovel into the soil, so we had to bring in a petrol powered digger, just to dig the soil. Shepherd Street is now abundant with plants.”

But after reading a United Nations report on food waste, Mobbs realised once again that his actions to address carbon emissions were inadequate. “I came to see that taking my house off grid was a failure,” he explains while raising three fingers at me. “I’m not giving you the finger,” he says with a laugh, “but if I ask you to view my fingers as a bar graph of countries by amount of pollution, the tallest finger, the most polluting finger, is China. Then the United States. Then food waste.”

When measured like a country, global food waste is the third biggest carbon emitter in the world. Faced with this information, Mobbs started thinking about garbage. In New South Wales, local council garbage collection is controlled by very few companies. He decided to break their monopoly on food waste.

To Mobbs’ maverick mind, this meant getting compost “away from old blokes doing weird things in the back garden”. His solution? “I gradually designed this seat that doesn’t say what it is and is in full public gaze. As Paul McCartney wrote, ‘Why don’t we do it in the road?’ I think he had other things on his mind, but it’s always struck me as a good line.

“I needed to compost food in the street,” he says. “Take away the awfulness of it, the smell of it, the lack of style. Make it cool. And if people would sit on it, not knowing they’re sitting on decaying food, not only would that give me a childish pleasure, but it would also reposition the idea of composting.”

Chippendale now has 15 coolseats. They turn between 300 and 400 kilograms of local food waste per week into about 20 to 30 kilograms of compost, which goes on local gardens, creating a nascent circular economy.

During the pandemic, Mobbs improved the design to make the seats self-reinforcing and stable, using radial-cut timber and Japanese joinery to give them a lifespan of 20 to 30 years. They must be able to survive extremes of heat and cold, wet and dry, while composting food without odour. The first improved coolseat was installed in August 2023, and schools, businesses and community groups are now keen to buy them. To meet his ambition of zero food waste in Chippendale, Mobbs needs to install about 264 coolseats by the end of 2024.

His many years of activism have taught Mobbs that collecting and composting food waste to grow trees, cool streets and produce local food is the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions. “We have about 1000 fruit trees, herbs and plants in Chippendale. They don’t grow well, they don’t produce much, but they’ve changed the way people see food and their own power over their own food.”

This community endeavour gives Mobbs great pleasure. But the greatest pleasure he receives from growing and composting food is the way it’s changed his perception of sunlight, water, plants. “I feel an intimate relationship with all that Earth gives us,” he says. “I have to show my love for Earth every day. It’s a sort of higher perspective akin to somebody, I suppose, kneeling in a church.”