Free Coffee Fuels Emu Parade, the Not-For-Profit Cleaning Up Sydney’s Beaches

Emu Parade, a not-for-profit named after the schoolyard exercise of everyone picking up rubbish, works on a trade agreement: you pick up rubbish and Roland Davies makes you a free cup of coffee, chai or hot chocolate. You’ll find him in a miniature fire truck called Trish – which runs on used vegetable oil – parked near a Sydney beach two mornings a week.

When Broadsheet visits Trish and Davies at Avalon Beach, it’s a bluebird day with plenty of swimmers about. Buckets and clawed tongs are handed over from under Trish’s canopy, and locals get to work making an idyllic slice of Sydney a little nicer. Trash once destined for the sea piles up in buckets and Davies is pulling shots using Supreme Coffee beans into reusable cups.

Davies, a Manly local, has worked as a barista and run his own cafes since leaving high school, but wanted to do more. “In my spare time, all I really do is go travelling to remote pieces of coast, and that ends up being picking up rubbish, cos it’s everywhere,” Davies tells Broadsheet. “Emu Parade felt like a next step into something a little more fulfilling than your standard cafe. It’s an opportunity to really start using the magic of coffee culture, and the communities that form around coffee; to really steer that energy towards something positive.”

People will often ask how much they need to pick up, but Davies never weighs the rubbish. “I just say ‘Whatever you think is worth one coffee’. I make it as easy as possible: zero rules, zero obligations, and most of the time people will come back for another bucket. I’ve got a real focus on the activity being a good time and a fun time – not a grim and thankless horrible time, which is what a lot of people think picking up rubbish has to be.”

There have been a few cases of people taking the piss – but the vast majority are on board, and Davies says the truck is “3D clickbait”. “The people who are least interested in anything environmental are – I hate to say it – middle-aged white guys. They start a conversation about the truck and don’t realise they’re starting a conversation about climate change.”

Emu Parade is a story of good, and a good story – and Davies is walking the walk. Operating as a not-for-profit is as much fit-for-purpose as it is a mark of credibility. “It doesn’t make sense to profit from something like this, so it underscored the whole thing. I started a Go Fund Me [in 2023] to get the truck build finished, cos I sunk all of my own money into it and came up short. I didn’t want there to be any outside chance that I could be just some guy profiting off the generosity of others.”

More proof that Davies is the real deal is Trish. The 1994 fire truck – which when purchased had a 1500-litre water tank, two hose reels and “bodywork scars where the fires scorched the paint or melted a panel” – runs on used vegetable oil. Davies kitted her up to operate on the sand, stripped her of her firefighting gear and converted the engine. Trish guzzles veggie oil that Davies filters after collecting it from takeaway joints – a fuel that’s viable (after engine work) in any of the older, multipoint injection motors “as long as it’s clean and hot enough, causing it to flow like diesel”.

“I know I’m on the hypercritical side of things – it’s not like I hold everybody else to the same standard,” says Davies. “Investigating alternative fuels is a pretty obvious start – there was an undeniable element of hypocrisy in driving a big diesel vehicle around, chirping about the environment. As soon as vegetable oil came up – which also matched what I needed for a vehicle big enough to haul a ton of rubbish off the beach, with space for all the coffee equipment, gear and stock – it just fell into place.”

That’s CO2 emissions down, petrol money saved, and a valiant clean-up effort organised and executed by a man who simply started because he wanted to fix something that bothered him. “Honestly, I wake up super early on the day cos I’m so excited, it’s something I‘ve been dreaming of doing for years and years. It’s hard to have a bad time. I don’t have any fomo, I don’t wonder if I could be spending my time more wisely doing something else, somewhere else.”

Emu Parade parks up on beaches in Sydney a few days a week, for up-to-date details check in on Instagram.