Page 757 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 5 April 2022
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professional viewpoint and from a community viewpoint, that we really need FOGO. We have known that we need FOGO for over a decade. I watched council after council roll out FOGO and I hoped that Canberra would act soon. I was so glad to put FOGO into our 2020 Parliamentary and Governing Agreement with Labor, and I was really happy to see Minister Steel roll out the FOGO trial.
I am even happier to hear about the incredibly low contamination rates that we have had so far. This has been a real problem in a lot of areas, and it looks as if Canberra will be able to manage it. I am actually not surprised. Canberrans are really conscientious and environmental, and we got great results from our garden waste. So it is really good to see that we are likely to get the same from our FOGO.
It is really important that we bring in city-wide FOGO as fast as we can. More than a third of waste in Canberra’s household bins is made up of discarded food. There is also a lot of food waste in our commercial stream. Reducing our food waste in the first place and then processing what is left to enrich our soils will keep that waste out of landfill and will make a really valuable product.
When food and other organics like garden waste breakdown in landfill, they release methane. That is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon. The methane from landfill at the moment accounts for around 10 per cent of the ACT’s tracked emissions. If we countered scope 3 emissions embedded in that food, we would get a much higher figure. Food waste really matters.
We are also making compost from our FOGO, and that is really important. Minister Vassarotti recently began consulting on the ACT government’s first ever food and fibre strategy. We know we need to grow more of our food, we need to recycle our food waste and we need to make really good compost to enrich our soils. Why do these things matter? We are in a climate emergency; we are running up against the natural limits of our environment. We cannot keep doing things the way we have done them in the past.
Another IPCC report came out yesterday. The UN Secretary General has blasted politicians in the wake of this grave climate crisis. He is calling current government actions:
… empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unliveable world.
He said:
Some Government and business leaders are saying one thing, but doing another. Simply put, they are lying.
Those are not my words; those are from the UN Secretary General in the IPCC report. I certainly do not want to be one of those politicians making empty pledges or saying one thing and doing another. We need real climate action, and we need to make it work. FOGO is a really simple, tangible, practical thing that we can do. It addresses 10 per cent of our tracked emissions right now.
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