Food waste recycling service: Getting Started
Food scraps, such as fruit, vegetables, bread, and other processed carbohydrates, can be placed in your green bin for collection and processing.
See What can you put in your green bin? for a full list.
- Not initially. Just keep to your current routine.
- Please continue to place your green lid bin out fortnightly for collection on your usual collection day.
- To find your green bin collection days, visit your Brisbane Bin app. You can even set-up reminders so you don’t forget to take your bin out. It will be more important now to take your bin out every fortnight, to ensure both your food and green waste are collected.
- On average in Brisbane, almost 30% of waste in the general red lid bin is food waste. When food waste is taken to landfill for disposal, it produces harmful greenhouse gas and methane, as it breaks down. Methane has a global warming potential 25 times greater than carbon dioxide.
- This food waste is also a valuable resource when recycled, and can be used for agriculture, gardens, and parks.
- Collecting food and garden waste allows it to be returned to the soil, ensuring all resources that went into producing, processing, and transporting the food are not lost.
- Enriching the soil with compost improves soil structure along with nutrient and water retention, which improves crop yields.
- Compost can also increase soil and plant health and reduce the need for pesticide and synthetic fertiliser usage.
After collection, your food and garden waste is taken to a specialist organics recycling facility to process the waste. This facility uses in-vessel composting technology to process food and green waste, which eliminates odour emissions and kills weed seeds and bacteria. This highly controlled composting process takes 42 to 50 days to convert food and garden waste into rich compost to meet Australian Standards.
- It’s then generally sold for use in the improvement of soil in a wide range of environments, including farms, parks, schools, and gardens across South East Queensland.
- The rich compost produced from your food and green waste is used by local farmers and home gardeners throughout the Brisbane area and beyond. Products available at many landscape suppliers across South East Queensland may contain a proportion of this product.
What goes in and stays out of the green bin?
Will the new service change the frequency of my fortnightly green bin collection?
Why is Council collecting food waste?
What happens to my food waste?
Who uses the compost?