Many State Governments are now mandating the separation of domestic food into a FOGO (food and garden organics) bin:
- WA – Perth and Peel councils must have FOGO
- SA – All Adelaide metro
- Vic – All of the State starting with Melbourne
- NSW – All of the State by 2030 (Sydney is the laggard)
- ACT
- QLD – nothing announced
- Tas – nothing announced
- NT – nothing announced
This will drive over three million tonnes of food waste out of landfill per year over the next few years. That is a great outcome and will massively reduce landfill greenhouse gas emissions. It will put a dent in the 11 million tons of greenhouse gases that our landfill stock generate.
It will have the added benefit of reducing odour emissions from landfills and somewhat reduce odour from half of our garbage truck fleet.
Moreover, if we can get enough food out of the red lidded bin (the garbage bin) then it makes the residual material that remains in the bin, dryer and more easily sorted. In the future we might start putting red bins through reprocessing facilities to try to further extract the glass, plastic, metals and fibre. This is less certain and will depend upon how much food we can actually divert from the red lid bin.
So far so good.
But we have a more immediate issue – the retention and growth of the compost markets.
My concern is that we seem to be developing a two tier compost market – high quality garden organics compost and low quality FOGO compost.
We are seeing push-back from buyers (councils, landscapers and farmers) about poor quality compost that has plastic, glass and other physical contaminants – from FOGO compost.
If we allow contaminated FOGO compost to enter the market and particularly on farming land or Council playing fields, we will soon frustrate the buyers and kill the markets.
It is simply not good enough to have plastic and glass and plastic fruit stickers and bread tags in compost that we are trying to sell.
We must adopt strict compost quality standards.
The current standard AS4454 is simply not good enough. It is voluntary and not up to the task.
It allows up to 0.5% physical contamination (glass, metal and rigid plastic) plus 0.05% of flexible plastic. If you have seen a pile of compost with 0.5% plastic, it is a LOT of plastic. No farmer in their right mind would put it on their land.
To make matters worse, as the organic matter degrades over time, it leaves the glass and plastic more exposed.
AS44545 was fine as a standard for source segregated garden waste but it has not been adapted for the addition of food (and the higher rates of contamination that accompany a more nuanced mix of materials).
MRA has developed the Local Government Best Practice Standard which halves the allowable limit of plastic and glass in compost compared to AS4454 (“AS4454 mark II” if you like.) We encourage Councils to adopt it in their contract specifications.
Of course it means more complex processing of the FOGO feedstock. That means more equipment, more labour and more process losses of organic material. That all comes at a cost.
Councils, the generators of the FOGO materials will necessarily need to pay this additional cost or take more control of the contamination risk and reduce it.
But what is the alternative?
Produce a low grade compost that nobody can use.
MRA modelling shows the cost premium is about $10/t. That is against a base rate gate fee across Australia of $100-160 av for FOGO composting. Still much cheaper than most landfilling.
On the positive side, we have already seen the uptake of the improved quality standards for compost by a number of councils but it is optional and not systematised. However once this is presented in the majority of council processing contracts it will become the new normal and create a level (higher) playing field.
My fear is we end up with a two-tier system, where some councils impose the high standard and others do not.
It should not be the responsibility of individual councils to ensure we retain the compost market. It must be the responsibility of State Government.
We do not want to end up with the two-tier system where we try to push low quality compost to farmers or councils or even, as I have seen occurring in some areas, using FOGO compost for landfill rehabilitation. That will fundamentally undermine the market and lead to erosion of confidence.
We know that the traditional composters have always put quality above all else.
I remember Patrick Soars, Lachlan Jeffries and Peter Wadewitz (all compost legends) railing against calling ‘Alternate waste technology derived organic rich fraction’ (AWT DORF) and “Municipal Waste Organic Output (MWOO)” “compost”, because in doing so they feared it would undermine the quality standards and the decades of market development undertaken by the compost sector. They were right.
Eventually the NSW EPA actually closed down the MWOO application to agricultural land because the EPA argued that the sector could not produce guaranteed quality material. (Although that is still hotly contested for use of the material in mine site and landfill rehabilitation).
I fear we might be doing the same thing again with ‘FOGO compost’.
We must establish a strong quality standard and enforce it. We must respect the markets that have been decades in development. We must use FOGO compost for its intended higher purpose – agriculture and urban landscaping to ensure that quality is maintained across the board and not eroded or undercut by low-cost operators.
It serves nobody’s interest to produce a low-grade compost and try to flog that to an unsuspecting market. Our focus must be on highest and best use. That is how we sustain a long-term circular economy for organics.
In the same vein, it therefore serves nobody’s long term interest to allow low-cost operators to win contracts by using FOGO compost for mine site, daily cover or landfill rehabilitation. That just creates a race to the bottom where everybody goes for low cost, low quality to try to win the work and stay in business. Dumb.
State EPA regulators, Councils and operators – we must all lift our collective game. We must respect the work done by the compost industry over decades and damage the agriculture and urban landscape markets.
That means Council FOGO tenders must include schedules to price in higher input contamination, output composts must meet minimum quality specifications for agriculture and urban use (which is higher than the current AS4454 standard), landfill rehabilitation and other “low brow” uses should be prohibited except under exceptional circumstances and EPAs must tighten performance criteria for end of waste or application to land.
Only then can we put ‘FOGO compost’ onto a sustainable, circular and high-quality path. A path that respects the value of the products we produce and the markets that we place it in.
PS (EPAs must also urgently ban plastic fruit stickers – those ubiquitous polluters of both home composting and industrial composting supplies).