Putting out the bins is one of life’s rituals. It’s not as simple as it used to be. Just as milk comes nowadays in whole, skim, soy, almond or oat to suit every taste, we have yellow lid bins for recycling, green for organics and red for general waste.
Soon, it’s all about to change again. FOGO stands for Food Organics and Garden Organics. It’s a mandatory overhaul of bin collection and recycling, coming to the Parramatta local government area later this year. All households will have their old bins taken away and receive brand new ones.
The essence of the change involves getting households to separate food from general waste. Currently, food scraps like fruit and vegetable peel, chicken bones, dairy matter and dinner leftovers go into the red bin. Starting from November in freestanding homes and apartments with less than 30 dwellings, this waste will now belong in the same bin as organics waste, such as grass, weeds, leaves and twigs.
Residents will receive a brand new green lid FOGO bin, the same as the current size. This will now be collected weekly instead of fortnightly. Households will also receive a 7-litre green-lid “kitchen caddy”, which can be used to fill food scraps, using a compostable bin liner, before being emptied into the FOGO bin.
The red bin, still collected weekly, will slim down for most households from 140 litres to 80 litres (in return for a reduction in council rates, although residences can keep a 140 litre red bin for what they pay today). The yellow recycling bin will remain unchanged. As a result, overall waste capacity per household will increase.
At its heart, FOGO is a climate and waste sustainability initiative. It is designed to reverse the trend of organic waste being sent to landfill and creating methane as it decomposes, which is a major contributor to global warming. According to Clean up Australia, each year Australians throw away about 7.3 million tonnes of food.
FOGO waste will now be commercially recycled as high quality nutrient-rich, weed-free compost. It will then be put back into the ground and used to support soil management in our farms, sporting fields and parks.
City of Parramatta estimates that FOGO will contribute to reducing waste sent to landfill by 85 per cent by 2038.
The NSW government has mandated that all councils introduce FOGO by 2030. More than 50 across the state have either implemented or are working on the scheme, along with at least 250 councils around Australia. Cumberland is moving slower than Parramatta and midway through a succession of trials.
There are specific issues about implementing FOGO locally. Home composting – with its potential to be smelly and attract pests – has generally been seen as an activity best done outdoors. As such, it is more suited to people living in homes. Burwood Council has commenced a trial that involves installing communal composting tubs outside apartments. Expanded community gardens or rooftop greenhouses could be a logical next step.
The Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (WSROC) has called for multi-unit dwellings to be given an extended deadline of 2035 to become part of the scheme. There also needs to be much greater community education.
One of the negative trends across Parramatta at the moment is a general lack of respect for cleanliness. Illegal dumping has become a blight of our age. Barely a week goes by with someone complaining on a community Facebook board about timber or furniture frames left out in the street to rot.
Speaking personally as an apartment owner, I’m still dealing with a musty mattress being tilted upright at the back of my garage carspot by person or persons unknown. I just haven’t had time to remove it. Coffee cups and old Maccas wrappings are regularly left strewn in apartment parking lots. And in communal waste areas themselves, it’s never a pleasant feeling to open the yellow recycling bin and find oozing, stinking bags that should have been chucked into general waste.
In short, too many people are gross, and many parts of Parramatta are struggling to cope with our bin collection system as it is now. FOGO is going to need a massive literacy campaign – with special attention paid to residents from multicultural backgrounds struggling to understand what it’s all about, along with well-established residents used to their traditional ways.
In a growing city, the universal code has to be cleanliness.
Alan is a journalist and communications specialist. He writes a weekly column for Parra News.