Page 2078 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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series of short videos to increase community awareness of how their food and organic waste collection system works. Bega Shire Council have provided residents with a kitchen caddy for their food waste, along with 150 compostable caddy liners each year, which reduces the likelihood of contamination due to residents using non-biodegradable bin liners.
Many jurisdictions have found they can reduce their green-lidded rubbish landfill waste collection from weekly to fortnightly once they have their organic waste collection system in place. That is the bit, after all, that in summer rots and smells. It makes up, as I said, more than a third of the landfill going from households. If you deal with that you can reduce your costs on the rest of it.
Of course, it is not just household food waste that we need to deal with. There is plenty of food waste from restaurants, supermarkets, facilities, event venues and other food and hospitality-related businesses. Some of that food is still edible, and some businesses in Canberra donate their excess to charities such as OzHarvest, SecondBite and Foodbank Australia. These collections can easily be expanded because even in Canberra there are people who go hungry. Nationally, nearly four million people experience food insecurity every year, and a quarter of them are children.
France was the first country to ban supermarkets throwing away or destroying unsold food, and they are required to donate it to charities or food banks instead, which is a really positive step forward and, I guess, what you would expect from a country that takes food so seriously. We need to take food equally seriously.
We have spoken to constituents, waste consultants, academics and stakeholders, and they all say the same thing: changing how we handle food organics and garden organics, which is known in the sector as FOGO, is long overdue. The ACT leads the way in many areas, and we should lead here but we in fact are far below the average on this one. What my motion is pointing out is that it is well past time to roll out a FOGO waste collection and it calls for a full program to be in place across Canberra by 2023.
The key to successful food waste composting is to ensure that you are only composting food waste; in other words, there is no contamination. One small piece of glass or plastic—glass in particular—can be enough to contaminate a significant amount of a truckload of FOGO waste. Maintaining low contamination levels means lower processing costs and higher quality, more marketable end product, not something that can only be used for mine rehabilitation.
The really good news here is that the contamination rate for our garden waste collection in the ACT is currently very low. And if we do as well as that with food waste—and there is no reason why we should not—we will be able to create high quality, saleable, usable compost out of our food waste. To do this, of course, our program has to commit to ongoing education and monitoring.
As you may be aware, the green-bin trucks have cameras on them so that they can see what is going in, and if people are doing the wrong thing they can be told, “No, this is not what you do with your green bin.” We need to keep up the same sort of system
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