In the five years since Wollongong City Council introduced FOGO into household collections, we've kept more than 150,000 tonnes of food and garden waste out of our landfill site.
We've also extended the life of the Wollongong Waste and Resource Recovery Park (or Whytes Gully) by an impressive 2.5 years – not a bad effort considering all FOGO asks residents to do is put food and organic waste into an alternative household bin.
"It's such a simple thing to embrace FOGO and this step is having a real, tangible impact on the landfill site at Kembla Grange,'' Lord Mayor of Wollongong Councillor Tania Brown said.
"To say we've extended the life of a landfill site by 2.5 years by embracing FOGO might not seem like much, but it's a critical step.
"We've a finite amount of land at Kembla Grange that can be used for landfill. Right now, we're building a new multi-million-dollar cell at Whytes Gully, which due to be finish by the end of the year.
"However, this only has an eight-year lifespan at the current rate of waste disposal and we're already making plans for the next steps after 2033. By doing more to reduce our waste now, we're taking important steps for our city's waste future.''
When it comes to FOGO, Wollongong is an industry leader.
While the NSW Government has mandated all councils must have a food organics/garden organics service in place by 2030, we introduced FOGO in November 2020.
Since then, we've worked to expand the city's FOGO collections and encouraged more and more people to keep organics out of red-lidded bins.
