For Wollongong residents, FOGO is a Go-Go!

Green-lidded bins will no longer be limited to garden waste with residents across the Wollongong City local government area able to include food and organic waste in their collections from November.

Council will introduce a weekly FOGO – or Food Organics Garden Organics – collection to all households that currently have a green-lidded garden waste bin.

Tania Brown (Wollongong City Council Acting Lord Mayor)

“We know that 40% of our landfill is food waste, so it’s very important that we get the landfill down, then we’re creating less methane gas and it’s much better for the environment. There was a wonderful response to the trial that we had in Austinmer, Cordeaux Heights and Warrawong, and so I’m sure that we’ll have people equally as excited to get involved with this and start to do their part to reduce the landfill.”

80,000 homes will become part of the program which will turn food scraps into compost with weekly green bin collections.

The investment by the council will not only provide environmental benefits, but will help SoilCo establish a second warehouse at Kembla Range to reduce the need to transport product to Nowra.

Reducing landfill will even create more jobs.

Charlie Emery (SoilCo General Manager)

“It’s been able to provide and increase capacity in the one location, so rather than having those heavy vehicles transferring materials to another facility 80kms away, we’re doing it in one location, and providing that additional capacity with reduction  in heavy vehicles and transport movements and so on. By that we’re creating a circular economy. Instead of one job putting it into the landfill we’re creating 5 jobs to continuously recycle our product.”

The FOGO rollout and weekly collection will start on November 16th.