From Adelaide to Sydney and Melbourne, Australian Dawoodi Bohra communities tracked compost, reduced waste and built a system that could make environmental awareness more mainstream in large-scale gatherings.
Ramadan is observed with deep enthusiasm in Dawoodi Bohra community centres around the world — a month of reflection, prayer, and shared meals. After the day’s fast, the community gathers around the thaal, a large round plate where eight members sit together to share dinner.
After the dinner service, the hall empties — but not entirely. In Adelaide, a group stays behind. One pair of hands sorts tea leaves and organic waste while others fill them into compost bags. Another pair weighs each bag and logs the number into a sheet.
During Ramadan this year, members of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community across Australia transformed a long-held cultural practice — avoiding food waste — into a coordinated environmental effort. What began in Adelaide was extended to Sydney and Melbourne, testing whether a discipline shaped by tradition could be scaled, measured, and sustained across cities.
Zero-waste practices are not new within the Dawoodi Bohra community. They have been shaped over time across everyday meals, educational programmes, and large gatherings. Initiatives like the no-plastic campaign — where thousands relied on refill stations instead of single-use bottles — showed how small changes, when adopted collectively, can shift behaviour at scale.
Where it started
Mindful consumption is intrinsic to Dawoodi Bohra culinary heritage, especially during Ramadan, a month marked by fasting from dawn to sunset and gathering each evening to break the fast. With these gatherings comes an embedded ethic: take only what is needed, and waste as little as possible.
This year, that ethic was formalised on a multi-city scale.
In Adelaide, volunteers began sorting organic waste, weighing it, and logging the data each night. The aim was not only to reduce waste, but to understand it — to quantify how much could be diverted from landfill through consistent effort.
“We saw that our local system was working — waste was being sorted, tracked, and composted properly. Ramadan gave us the chance to apply that model nationwide.”
— Zulfiqar Adenwala, Coordinator
Scaling across cities
In Sydney, where the community is significantly larger, the early days brought real challenges. Many volunteers had never composted before. The questions were basic but essential: what could be sorted, what couldn’t, and how should it be handled?
By the end of the month, the same people were teaching others. Disposable chai cups were replaced with reusable ones — around 15,000 over the course of Ramadan. Tea leaves were composted. Milk crates were recycled. Daily learnings crystallised into habits.
Melbourne implemented a similar approach, working within local systems. Community volunteers segregated waste and partnered with the local Council to ensure compostable items reached their designated areas.
“Every meal is a gift. We wanted to ensure nothing was wasted.”
— Taha Shakir, volunteer in Melbourne
Murtaza Pishori, who runs a local coffee business, began repurposing leftover date seeds from iftar — roasting them to brew coffee rather than discarding them.
Compost bags were weighed daily. Numbers flowed into a spreadsheet, then to Adelaide, where Zulfiqar’s team used the Natur-Bag platform to calculate the total environmental impact.
How it held together
The hardest part, organisers noted, was consistency — making sure each bag was weighed and each figure entered, even on the nights when volunteers were tired.
Over the course of the month, the effort produced measurable results.
Individually, these figures are modest. Collectively, they point to something more significant: the potential to turn everyday behaviour into repeatable environmental action.
Teaching it early
Perhaps the most enduring part of the initiative was the participation of children — shadowing their elders, watching how decisions were made, and learning by doing.
In Melbourne, Taha Shakir led nightly storytelling sessions that wove zero-waste thinking into the fabric of Ramadan for everyone. He also organised treasure hunts where children competed to find the smallest scraps — a single grain of rice, a lone tea leaf — and earned stars for handing them in.
“One evening, they searched for a single grain of rice. Whoever found and returned it, was rewarded.”
— Taha Shakir
These were moments of formation — instilling the understanding that nothing becomes “waste” until it is treated as such.
What it means going forward
What has been implemented across events is now being shaped into a system that can move across cities, be measured consistently, and improve over time.
What this initiative shows is not just what can be achieved during a single event, but what happens when a practice becomes consistent — not as a one-time effort, but as a way of doing things.
