Page 2079 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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and education to ensure that people put just food waste in the bin for food waste—or food waste and garden waste, I expect. The communications and community engagement strategies will have to be there at the beginning of the rollout and they will have to keep going over the years to keep the quality going and to make sure that we actually do put our food waste in the right bin.
Of course, not all of us live in units and houses that have the green bin garden waste system. And there are some practical issues for collecting food and organic waste in multi-storey, multi-unit developments. The good news is that this is a global issue and many solutions are being developed. I have heard of self-contained composting units that can be scaled in size depending on the number of occupants in a building. They can compost the complex’s food waste entirely onsite and have a very saleable product at the other end. If there is a communal garden or landscaped area there may well be space for conventional composting on site. I know that there are some government grants available for this and that some multi-unit developments have taken advantage of them.
There are also, as I mentioned, commercial food waste producers: cafes, restaurants, supermarkets and events. These businesses do not get a waste service from the ACT government. They have to organise and pay for it themselves. My motion would require them to implement a zero food waste to landfill program involving composting as well as donating usable food to charities such as OzHarvest.
I imagine that, in practice, this will be implemented by a combination of carrots—in terms of government assistance for setting up new collection methodology, including for existing food rescue organisations such as OzHarvest who I am sure would be delighted to be able to expand—and also sticks such as have been used in France to stop food going to landfill.
Once collected, there are many options for processing food waste such as open-window composting, worm composting and anaerobic digestion which produces compost and biogas. Currently, there are businesses such as Goterra in Fyshwick which use black soldier fly larvae to compost organic waste and turn it into valuable feedstock; all of Queanbeyan hospital’s food waste is treated by them. Able Organic Recycling collects twice weekly from a number of government departments and uses worms in their facility at Weston Creek. Corkhills have been composting Canberra’s garden waste for literally decades, and the Living Green Vegan Market composts 100 per cent of their food waste, and that is collected by Global Worming.
The ANU used to compost all of its food waste and use it onsite in their extensive landscaped areas. The University of Canberra are currently in the process of putting together a new sustainable strategy which includes improving waste management on campus. They have started a compost trial as part of achieving this goal. Via food scrap collection they have measured the amount of organic waste they are producing and they are now looking into how they are going to manage it. These are just a few examples of what is being done.
One other thing that is being done in other jurisdictions and should be done here is the love food, hate waste program, whereby we need to educate the community about
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