More public education needed on waste recycling, says industry

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The industry that recycles Australia's food and garden waste is calling for more public education, saying the level of contamination from plastics and other rubbish is far too high. 14 years after the so-called FOGO bins were introduced, the sector says while many householders are getting it right, others don't seem to understand or care about the system.

Transcript

00:00 Lana Jones lives in an apartment in Perth.

00:03 It requires commitment and some extra steps,

00:06 but she's doing her bit for the planet

00:08 by separating her food scraps from her general rubbish.

00:12 I think it's pretty easy to use.

00:14 It's just like another way of recycling, I suppose.

00:17 She's on the second floor,

00:20 so takes her food waste down to the bins in the basement,

00:23 which include what's called a Fogel bin.

00:25 But not everyone's on board.

00:27 I do think people have definitely got confused in my experience.

00:30 Like, I'll go to put my rubbish in there

00:32 and I'll see there's, like, plastic bags

00:34 or non-biodegradable bags

00:36 or sometimes, like, nappies and things like that.

00:39 There you go.

00:40 It's an all-too-common problem,

00:42 according to this processor of organic waste in Sydney.

00:45 A whole load of red bin rubbish just thrown in the green bin.

00:49 This is what he's looking for.

00:51 The bag looks good. That's what we want.

00:53 There's food waste in that bag.

00:55 It takes a long, involved process to decontaminate the waste,

00:59 including a team of staff who have to manually remove the contaminants,

01:03 everything from plastics and glass to clothes.

01:06 There's a lot of people out there that really don't care.

01:09 They think that recycling is a joke.

01:11 It's not. We're deadly serious.

01:13 Fogel, which stands for Food Organics and Garden Organics,

01:17 was introduced 14 years ago by a council in Sydney.

01:20 Since then, 27% of the country's food waste

01:24 has been collected by the city.

01:26 And 17% of the country's 563 councils have introduced the system,

01:32 and 16% collect garden waste only.

01:36 The system saves food from rotting in landfill sites

01:41 and adding to carbon emissions.

01:43 At the moment, half of what goes into the general waste bin is food waste,

01:48 and that's, you know, a resource that could be used

01:51 in landfill where it gives off methane, which is damaging to the environment.

01:55 As opposed to being recycled into millions of tonnes of compost

01:59 for gardens and for farmers to grow food.

02:02 There's an endless market in agriculture,

02:04 providing we can remove the contaminants,

02:06 and basically ends up back in the soil as a carbon source and a nutrient source.

02:11 Whoa!

02:13 Federal Government has set a new goal for all metropolitan households

02:17 to recycle their food waste by 2030.

02:20 To achieve this, the composters say there will need to be changes.

02:23 To do a proper FOGO rollout, you've got to look at the size of that red bin.

02:27 This is the key to the whole thing.

02:29 If the red bin is too small, you're never going to get on top of the contaminants.

02:33 Good food comes from good land.

02:37 Good land comes from good soil.

02:40 While they say many councils are getting it right,

02:43 with low contamination rates,

02:45 public education before, during and after the rollout of FOGO is vital.

02:50 tall.

02:50 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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