Trash Talking With Roly 03.

Crikey, it’s been a hot minute since our last yarn, hasn’t it? 

Last time… hmm. Where were we up to in this wild goose chase? Oh yeah! Remembering how cafes were the thin glue holding the fabric of society together during Covid madness. Bragging about discovering used vegetable oil as fuel. Whingeing about shit mechanics. Freaking out about how much rubbish is polluting our coasts and poisoning the sea, and being resolutely ignored by most people. 

Working very, very hard to save up and buy a thirty-year-old fire truck, for the second time, to convert into a vegetable oil-powered espresso cart and doing the whole bloody thing over again from the start. 

That’s right. 

I was actually mid-shift on the coffee machine when she arrived, delivered sight-unseen to my cafe, rumbling around the corner and evaporating my concentration in a noisy instant. T’was the first jug of milk I’d properly scorched in a long time; our love was instant! 

Trish had all the same sounds, smells and idiosyncrasies as the last truck whom I had so adored, but represented a perfectly blank canvas to once again execute this now-refined concept of bribing people with free coffee to pick up rubbish at the beach. 

I didn’t know she was called Trish when we first met. The name took a couple of weeks to arrive, and felt more like a midnight realisation than a choice.She’s a vivacious elderly lady, of course, her name is Trish!And converting her from firefighting spec to used cooking oil/coffee/cleanup spec was a pretty huge adventure in itself. 

It took me about 2 months to do the conversion, this time by myself, modifying and replumbing the fuel system while she was perched by the footpath outside my unit block. Incredibly, it worked, and this time it cost approximately 10% of what the “professionals” I’d gone to last time had fleeced me of. Free carbon-neutral fuel was unlocked once more. 

Over the months that followed, I carefully planned out every little thing Trish would need to help me run cleanups. Coffee machinery, batteries, a solar panel, a fridge, heaps of bags/buckets and grabbers, sanitation stuff. Tools and spares. Drums of oil. A secure canopy to house it all. The list was long and expensive. Where was everything going to go, and how was it going to be stowed? How am I paying for all of this again? There was a lot to think about. 

So I knuckled down and kept working hard, draining my bank account yet again before the divine magic of crowdfunding, combined with help from a Supremely forward-thinking Coffee roaster, meant that Trish was finished in September 2023. Emu Parade cleanups could formally resume. 

Now, it’s May 2025, and we’ve done well over 100 community cleanups, plus a bunch of team-building corporate cleanups too. They’ve been mostly around home in Sydney, seeing thousands of cups of coffee exchanged for thousands of kilograms of rubbish pulled out of our beautiful coastal ecosystems.

Although the volume of pollution we find is painfully consistent, Emu Parade cleanups are - if I may say so myself as the proprietor - among the most uplifting sustainability experiences one can have. Because no matter how reliable it is to find wayward trash in sand dunes and along the high tide lines, it’smorereliable that good people are always nearby, and enthusiastic to help do something about it. 

It’s also not depressing because, in line with my first experiences of getting deep with it alone in the dunes of Stockton Bight, picking up rubbish reallydoesmake you feel good! And it’s immensely fulfilling to finally behold the verification of that over and over again by the volunteers who come along to Emu Parades. 

“It’s so addictive!” 

“It’s actually really therapeutic” 

“I can’t believe how much rubbish is out there” 

“I didn’t want to stop doing it.” 

“... wow, this is the most perfect flat white I’ve ever had” 

These are words and phrases I hear at every single cleanup without fail. I don’t share them with you here to toot me own horn, mind you, but to celebrate the fruition of an unprecedented appetite for cleaning up the planet! It’s astonishing! How indescribably wonderful it is to connect with people who are frothing out on the opportunity to do some good, amidst all the warmth and atmosphere of a bustling neighbourhood caff. 

This immensely double-edged revelation of “environ-mental health” that I’d stumbled upon with Big Suse, now being experienced by humans from all walks and ilks. And all thanks to a damn good cup of coffee. Looking after our planet by looking after our minds; looking after our minds by looking after our planet. 

As much as Emu Parade is an environmental exercise, it’s equally - and some days even more - about mental health and community wellbeing. 

Because we kinda all know how broken the planet is. It’s hard to avoid the headlines, and the doom and guilt and fear about the perilous instability of major biological systems that we rely on to live. Google searches related to climate anxiety have increased over 4500% in the last 5 years. We’re confronted by the prospect of environmental apocalypse at every turn, so it’s therefore incredibly hard to feel inspired that we’ll actually surmount the challenges Earth is facing. 

So, creating chances to come together and celebrate one basic thing that we very easilycando to improve the world around us has a lot more value than it might seem on the surface. 

Sure, it’s just a bucket of rubbish from one beach, and it’s just a cup of coffee made on the back of an old truck. None of it is necessarily going to “fix” any one problem. But there really is something special that goes on when you go hunting for trash by the sea with Trish. 

If ya don’t believe me… well. You should probably just join in and feel the magic for yourself.