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A new community education campaign to help residents make the most of food and organics recycling was launched today.
Last year the Northern Rivers diverted more than 42,000 tonnes of food and garden waste from landfill through the kerbside green bin service. However, a further 17,000 tonnes of green waste was left in the red bin and lost to landfill, with more than 12,000 tonnes of this being food.
The aim is to have food and garden scraps correctly placed into the green bin where they are sent to a commercial grade composting facility and turned into high quality compost.
The Let’s Get Our Scrap Together campaign developed by the NSW EPA will run across the Northern Rivers until October featuring television, radio and social media ads, pop up community events and school waste education programs thanks to a $52,000 grant.
Council’s Director Sustainable Communities and Environment Stewart Brawley welcomed the campaign for the Tweed region.
“This campaign will go a long way to help us achieve our goal of diverting 70% of household waste from landfill by 2025,” Mr Brawley said.
“We have a state-of-the-art organics processing facility here in the Tweed, turning food and garden organics into compost. The aim of this campaign is to engage with all of the community to encourage us all to remove food waste from our red bins and to either use their green bins or compost at home.
“Last year 27,000 weekly garden organics bins were serviced in the Tweed with more than 14,000 tonnes of food and garden material collected.
”While that’s a great result, we can do better as the processing facility has the capacity to process up to 21,000 tonnes of food and garden organics on site annually,” he said.
When food and garden waste is sent to landfill it breaks down to generate leachate, a toxic liquid and greenhouse gases including methane which is 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. Using your waste collection services correctly is a simple way each and every one of us can contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
To ensure you’re making every scrap count, visit www.newaste.org.au/scrap or contact Council’s Resource Recovery team on 02 6670 2400 to explore what’s happening in your local community.
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