Council’s idea far from rubbish

AROUND 2000 tonnes of waste could be diverted from landfill if the South Gippsland Shire Council introduced a food organics/green organics (FOGO) waste collection service.
Council collects around 4000 tonnes of garbage per year and at the last audit in 2017, 44 percent was food waste (by weight).
Council’s waste management supervisor Peter Roberts said, “You could be looking at a potential reduction of 2000 tonnes of diversion, but it depends on people doing the right thing.”
The council’s waste collection contract is up for renewal on January 31, 2020, which could provide the opportunity to introduce the FOGO service.
Council currently provides garbage and recycling collection to 11,500 properties and green waste collection to around 7300 properties.
The current service is under contract by Cleanaway.
Mr Roberts said when the contract comes up for renewal, the decision needed to be made on which services to include.
Mr Roberts said many Victorian councils were opting to include a FOGO service, including Bass Coast.
“There are options available to change the services currently provided to get better resource recovery,” he said.
If the FOGO service was introduced, additional costs would be directly passed on to ratepayers.
Mr Roberts said all costs for the current garbage collection services were recovered from ratepayers.
“If the costs were to go up, then the charge to ratepayers would increase,” he said.
At council’s public presentation meeting last Wednesday, councillors were presented with four options for future contracts.
Three included the introduction of FOGO collection and the fourth was to maintain the current level of service.
Mr Roberts said since introducing green waste collection in 2015, bin audits have shown the amount of green waste in kerbside garbage sent to landfill has reduced from 20 percent to one percent.
He said at that time, it was not viable to include an option in the contract for FOGO waste collection, due to a lack of facilities able to accept the waste.
Currently, the only facility accepting FOGO waste is Dutson Downs, near Sale in the state’s east.
“The purpose of today was to put the ideas out there. There are a number of things going on in waste that could make those options more or less viable,” he said.
“By the time we get to this, the goal posts could have shifted.”
Mr Roberts said the introduction of a FOGO service would require “significant behaviour change” from ratepayers, to ensure the success of the service.
He said a lot of effort needed to go into educating people about doing the right thing.
“If you scrimp on education, you run into trouble,” he said.
“The viability of FOGO depends on keeping contamination low. If there is too much general waste going into the bins, the processors won’t accept it.”

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Posted by Tayla Kershaw on Apr 24 2018. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry