Page 2080 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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how valuable food is and how we can better use it so that there will be less food waste and thus less to compost. Ultimately, of course, the best thing to do with food is eat it. Compost is a good thing to do if there is not something you can do with the food. Ultimately, we need to look at the whole food supply chain, reduce waste and, with what waste we do have, use it better, compost it, and not send it to landfill.
Today is World Environment Day, which is an international day created to encourage awareness and action to protect our environment. The theme for this year’s day is air pollution. Given that when food and garden organic waste are put into landfill it decomposes and it releases methane gas, that is a relevant issue for today’s World Environment Day.
Composting offers an environmentally superior alternative to sending organic matter to landfill, drastically reduces methane production, improving soil fertility as well as providing a series of economic and environmental co-benefits. The Greens have been pushing for action on organic waste for the entire time I have been a member of this place. We believe that the more waste we can reduce, recycle and compost, the better off our environment, our climate and our soil will be. I look forward to the Assembly supporting this step today.
Visitors
MADAM SPEAKER: I bring to members’ attention that in the gallery we have year 6 students from Ainslie Primary School visiting the Assembly this morning. Welcome to your Assembly, and thank you for visiting us.
Environment—waste disposal
Debate resumed.
MR STEEL (Murrumbidgee—Minister for City Services, Minister for Community Services and Facilities, Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Minister for Roads) (10.16): I would like to thank Ms Le Couteur for bringing this motion before the Assembly as an advocate for waste reduction in our community. This motion reaffirms the commitment that our government has made to introducing food organics and garden organics based collection, as initially outlined in our waste feasibility study from last year.
We have an ambitious target to divert 90 per cent of waste from landfill by 2025, and our government has set out time frames to achieve this. We have successfully rolled out green bins to every Canberra household, ahead of schedule and under budget. We have introduced a container deposit scheme to encourage more Canberrans to recycle bottles and other containers. We are investigating waste-to-energy solutions for our city, including advanced forms of composting, including organic processing like anaerobic digestion. And as part of yesterday’s budget, we are beginning planning for food organics and garden organics collection to begin in the ACT. I want to again thank the Greens for their support of our government’s commitment to FOGO.
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