Page 4574 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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have community gardens. They are also a great supplement to schools and aged-care accommodation. I know that more are being proposed by the community, but we need a bit more government support to get them off the ground.
I was recently at a meeting of around 100 people looking at developing a city farm or city hub which would probably be modelled on the very successful CERES project in Melbourne. It would be a place where community gardeners and farmers could get together and grow food and ideas. It may be a place where there are allotments. It is a concept which has been around for a few years; it would be great for Canberra if it took off. It is really important that the government takes on food production in planning and allocates space for community gardens, encourages backyard production and ensures that our scarce agricultural land is not alienated.
Another important area for government action is organic waste. Organic waste—food scraps and garden clippings—is what is needed to create compost and thus improve our soils. Our local soils are in general very poor, apart from around Pialligo and Dairy Flat and that area, but we are importing a lot of food the waste from which we can turn into compost to improve them. The key to good compost is just composting organic matter. It is separating out the organic matter. This has been done very successfully locally in Goulburn with the city to soil program.
Many people in Canberra compost at home, and there are a number of businesses that take organic waste and compost it or grow worms in it commercially. I was talking to one yesterday with the wonderful title of Global Worming—not “Global warming”; that is the pun we were making. While I should not be supporting a particular company, I thought it was such a good name that I could not resist it. The Assembly uses one such company. And at ANU, for instance, all their food wastes are processed in a system called HotRot, which produces gorgeous compost in just a bit over a week.
At present, the ACT sends a lot of organic waste to landfill. About 24 per cent of our landfill is organic. This is an important issue that the Greens have sought to address in our parliamentary agreement with the Labor Party. We sought a domestic organic waste trial and organic waste collections for the commercial sector. Unfortunately, the Labor Party has not yet acted on these commitments.
Unfortunately the ACT’s draft waste strategy does not propose to separate out organic waste to feed our soil and thus produce food. It plans a waste to energy scheme, which would appear to have a low-grade output which may be able to be used as a soil conditioner and coat landfill sites, but it does not appear that it will produce real compost that actually can be used for food production. It is likely to have the same sort of problems that ones near Sydney have had. The Greens call on the government to take food production seriously and therefore stop wasting our local organic waste, our local organic food scraps and garden waste. There is a better use for it.
Talking about better use, another local food initiative that is important is reducing food waste. The Australia Institute found that Australians are throwing out about $1.1 billion worth of fresh food and vegies every year, and a similar amount is spent on restaurant and takeaway food that is ordered but not actually eaten. It is in the order of 20 per cent of all food. According to these figures, ACT residents waste more
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