Page 2077 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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In response to my motion the government did not quite deliver that but what it delivered was the better suburbs process which included a citizens forum of 54 Canberra residents as a representative sample of the ACT population. It was not able to make the bigger budgetary decisions but it was asked to, and it did, prioritise city services’ responsibilities. It ranked household waste and recycling as the equal second most urgent and important responsibility for city services.
In the 2019-20 budget, which was released yesterday, the ACT government has committed to managing waste better via undertaking early planning for a food organics and garden organics, FOGO, waste service. I should mention that, while of course I am pleased the ACT government made this commitment, as a crossbench member I had no knowledge of this when I lodged my motion. My motion, if passed, which I hope it will be, will see an acceleration of the planning and then the early implementation of a food organics—I was going to say “recycling service”; maybe that is not the way to put it—compost service. There is a really strong case for implementing a food and organic waste collection service.
Many of us compost our food waste at home but unfortunately not everyone in Canberra does. They do not have the time or they do not have the space. In Canberra food waste is about 37 per cent of the volume of residential landfill. For Canberra to be carbon neutral by 2045, as we have committed to, we must address this as a community, as a government and as businesses. Food waste is carbon based, and when it decomposes in landfill it produces methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas.
Mugga Lane landfill is filling up. Expanding it or starting a whole new landfill site would be both difficult and expensive. We need to take urgent action now to simply reduce the amount of waste going to landfill and we need to take urgent action now to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that the ACT produces. Organic waste is, in both these contexts, low-hanging fruit and we should work on it sooner rather than later.
As well, there are lots of benefits. Food waste is bulky. Inherently, this is going to be a local or regional exercise, producing local and regional jobs. There are already local companies who work on this and they produce local, sustainable jobs. Putting nutrient-rich organic matter in landfill is inherently wasteful. We need to be looking at circular, sustainable systems for returning carbon and nutrients to agricultural soil. Compost is a growing business, literally, in any sense of the word.
Kerbside food and organic waste collection services work elsewhere—elsewhere in the world and elsewhere in Australia; we just do not need to reinvent the wheel on this. Across Australia councils ranging from those in urban areas such as Melbourne’s Moreland City Council, with a population of around 170,000, to rural councils such as Coolamon Shire in mid-western New South Wales, with a population of fewer than 5,000, have already rolled out successful food and organic waste collection programs.
At least 28 of New South Wales’s 129 local government areas now have food and organic waste programs in place. And they have all done them a little differently and there are things that we can learn from them. Shellharbour City Council have made a
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