Matthew Knight, founder of The Feed Ducks Initiative: 'The aim of The Feed Ducks Initiative is to make feeding more sustainable.'
“I knew that feeding bread was not good for wildlife,” he adds. “It had consequences for their habitats and also encourages the spread of disease. I thought there had to be a better way and the light-bulb moment came when I asked myself a simple question: if we put a dispenser in our local park with the right feed, would families stop bringing bread and use the dispenser instead?
Knight knew the idea had legs when within a few months of installing the Cork units he was contacted by UK councils interested in feeders for their areas. “It was back to the drawing board as I knew that extending the initiative meant our dispensers would have to be of a certain size and to work in certain way to successfully scale the initiative,” Knight says. “What we subsequently designed was the world’s first solar-powered duck food dispenser.