Our Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) kerbside collection service has just celebrated its first birthday! To mark the event, we held a community celebration on Saturday 22 May at Camberwell Primary School.
Costa Georgiadis from the ABC's Gardening Australia program was our special guest. He spoke about the importance of the FOGO service, as well as the sustainable practices we can all do together to continue to drive better environmental outcomes.
Previously, with food and garden waste making up more than half the contents of the average Boroondara waste bin, we knew implementing a FOGO kerbside service had the potential to make a huge difference - and what a difference we have seen!
On average, Boroondara is now diverting 68 per cent of waste generated by our community away from landfill - an increase in almost 20 per cent from a year ago.
Since FOGO was introduced in May 2020, we've seen around 200 tonnes of food and garden waste being redirected into FOGO bins each week that would have otherwise previously gone to landfill, causing harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
In total, our waste crew are now collecting over 600 tonnes of FOGO material weekly - the equivalent to 35 large full waste trucks - which is sent off to be composted.
FOGO has provided a great opportunity for a large number of people in our community to take action and more responsibly manage the waste we generate.
Not only does the FOGO bin reduce landfill, create compost and drive a more circular economy, it also leads to greater awareness about the need to avoid and reduce waste.
The introduction of FOGO was the biggest change to Council's waste service in over 30 years, and we appreciate the support you've shown while we transitioned to this new service model.
Our community has embraced the change and we now have almost 50,000 households utilising the service.
Having already rolled out FOGO to houses and town houses, we're currently finalising the roll-out across larger unit and apartment complexes that also receive Council bin collections.
See FOGO bin to find out what you can put into your FOGO bin.
