The environment, particularly climate change, was a key issue at the recent federal election amid increasing calls for action on carbon emissions and renewable energy. It may have taken politicians a long time to heed the clamour for change, but a few zero-waste pioneers have been trying to clean up our backyard for years.

Pin-ups for waste-free living include Ronni Kahn, who set up food-rescue organisation OzHarvest in 2004, and eco-warrior and designer Joost Bakker, who opened Australia’s first no-waste restaurant more than a decade ago. Armed with our reusable coffee cups and cotton tote bags, Australians are becoming more savvy about cutting waste. But food waste remains one of the most pertinent environmental issues. If it was a country, food waste would be the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China and the US, according to a UN report.

“It frustrates me that we obsess about electric cars, coal power stations and plastic bags, because the biggest environmental problem is food,” says Bakker, who broke new ground with no-waste Melbourne pop-up restaurant Greenhouse in 2008.His latest project, to launch in September,will “radically change the whole food system”, he says.

Titled Future Cave, it involves his former chef Matt Stone and Stone’s partner Jo Barrett – co-chefs at Oakridge Estate in the Yarra Valley – living for a year in a self-sustaining,zero-emissions house designed by Bakker replete with vertical and rooftop gardens, beehives and insect farms. Bakker and Stone agree waste is a lack of imagination rather than a lack of options.

Creativity starts before a single dish is cooked, says Stone, by looking at how food is grown and procured. He gives his suppliers reusable containers and he has given up sous-vide cooking, which is reliant on plastic bags.The restaurant has a kitchen garden and composter, and Stone and Barrett have a closed-loop organic composter at home in their tiny Fitzroy terrace. 30 delicious.com.au “Looking at the waste around food – how the product gets to you and the impact that it has – that’s what we should be talking about,” says Stone.

Ronni Kahn echoes this: “Australia is lagging way behind in the fight against food waste. Despite setting a national target to halve food waste by 2030 (in line with UN Sustainable Development Goals) and launching a National Food Waste Strategy 18 months ago, progress is slow on addressing this critical issue,” she says.

Meanwhile, Lisa and Andrew Margan pioneered environmental sustainability in the Australian wine industry with their environment management plan for their Hunter Valley winery, which benchmarks to the international best practice standard ISO 14000. It covers everything from on-site waste management and energy consumption (Margan is solar-powered and on a sunny day they send energy back into the grid) to natural pest management and reduction of carbon footprint through reforestation, while the produce on the menu of their acclaimed Margan restaurant is almost entirely estate- grown or reared.

“We recycle everything,” says Lisa. They have a glass crusher,five compost bins on rotation and chickens to help. A closed-loop composter handles all the restaurant’s protein scraps. Spent cooking oil is recycled into biodiesel and rainwater is harvested and recycled onto the garden. The Margans are considered industry leaders – they were working on their plan while others were still arguing over whether climate change existed. “What we’ve done has been pioneering namely because we did it so long ago.A lot of people now come to us for advice on how to start and we’ve seen consumer awareness and demand for producers who are following an ethical pathway,” says Lisa.

James Robson of Ross Hill Wines in Orange describes himself as an environmentalist, fitting for the man behind Australia’s first carbon-neutral winery. It runs on solar energy, recycle water, offsets carbon emissions witha cherry tree orchard and is developing closed-loop compost systems that convert grape marc – the solid debris leftover from winemaking – into compost to return to the vineyard.“We don’t want to produce any carbon. Full stop,” says Robson. “What’s interesting is the support this has garnered.”