Leading the way on organic recycling – but more work to be done

Leading the way on organic recycling – but more work to be done

Published on 13 November 2023

There are areas to celebrate and areas for improvement for the City of Hobart when it comes to this year’s National Recycling Week theme “what goes around, comes around”, focusing on food waste and packaging.

The City of Hobart’s Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) program has been embraced by the community and has proven to be a stunning success.

In the City about 15,800 residents and businesses use FOGO bins – an impressive take up rate of about 75 per cent.

And the Hobart residents know how to use them. According to Clean Up Australia, average FOGO bin contamination rates (plastics etc) across the country are about 2 per cent. But the latest stats for the City of Hobart shows it is just 0.23 per cent.

"This material is collected and delivered to our compost facility at McRobies Waste Management Centre,” Hobart Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds said.

“It makes up a part of the 4,500 tonnes of material we have collected from the Hobart community and diverted from landfill through the FOGO service this past year.”

And Hobart Sustainability in Infrastructure Portfolio Chair Bill Harvey said it was not just households contributing to this reduction in landfill.

“The City has a number of public-place FOGO bins at key areas such as dog exercise parks like John Turnbull Park in Lenah Valley, and Soldiers Memorial Oval on the Queens Domain,” Cr Harvey said.

“The City also provides dog tidy bags from its dispensers.

“These bags are compostable, and also manufactured under Australian standards.”

However, there are still areas the City of Hobart can improve on.

While the use and uptake of FOGO bins in Hobart has been a success, recent analysis shows 97 per cent of the content was garden waste, with food organics still making their way into regular waste bin.

Many believe food waste in landfill just composes naturally.

But food organics in landfill breaks down to create harmful gasses for our environment.

Of the general waste stream, 59 per cent was misplaced material, and almost 46 per cent of that should have been going into FOGO bins.

Almost half of the average Australian waste bin contains food, and it is the same in the City of Hobart despite FOGO bins making it easy for Hobartians to divert this resource from landfill.

“Once disposed of in landfill, food waste rots, transforming the organic material in the food into methane and carbon dioxide,” Cr Reynolds said.

“Unfortunately, methane is 25 times more harmful to our atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

“Food waste also causes other issues with odour, leaching, attracting vermin, and is a potential source for disease.

“By composting or using your FOGO so that we compost for you, not only are you reducing methane gases from being emitted from landfill, you’re also mitigating one of the biggest challenges of our time – climate change.”

FOGO bins are not the only area in which the City of Hobart is tackling recycling and the broader issues of climate change to make the capital more sustainable.

The City of Hobart is leading the way in this space, including:

In July 2021, Hobart became the first city in Australia to ban single-use plastic takeaway food packaging as part of a wider move to become single-use plastic free. Additionally, the City is also preparing for life without its own landfill and set a target date of 2030 to cease the operation of the landfill at McRobies Gully in South Hobart and have zero landfill waste. The Climate Strategy community consultation, Climate Ready Hobart, is currently underway with a public survey and applications to join the Hobart Climate Assembly. The City of Hobart also supports home composting with some freely available illustrated guides and a booklet on how to compost and keep chickens (https://www.hobartcity.com.au/Residents/Recycling-and-rubbish/FOGO-and-compost) as well as free home composting workshops throughout the year.