Hundreds of thousands of households in Melbourne’s south-east suburbs will be sending their food scraps and green waste to a new composting plant, reports The Age.

The $65 million Southeastern Organics Processing Facility is currently under construction in Dandenong South and is expected to be operational by mid 2019.

This year, the City of Glen Eira allowed residents to include food wastage in their ‘green’ bin, usually reserved for plant and garden clippings. Bayside, Casey, Cardinia, Frankston, Greater Dandenong, Monash and Kingston councils will join Glen Eira in allowing their residents to follow suit. 

The waste, expected to be around 120,000 tonnes per year, will be sent to the new facility where it will be recycled to 50,000 tonnes of high-grade compost to be used in the councils’ parks and gardens.

“While avoiding the generation of waste is our first priority, we also need to harness opportunities for reuse, recycling, reprocessing and energy recovery,” Minister for the Environment and Energy, Mr Josh Frydenberg, said.

“Converting waste to compost can play a part in Australia’s long-term waste solutions.

“This facility alone, which will be the most advanced of its type in Victoria, can process around 12,000 truckloads of waste per year.

“It means food and organic waste produced by south east Melbourne residents will not end up in landfill and will instead produce high-grade compost for our gardens and parks.”

By reducing the amount of waste going to landfill, the facility is expected to abate more than 65,000 tones of CO2 emissions per year—the equivalent of removing almost 14,000 cars from the road per year.

Bayside mayor Laurence Evans said the council sent more than 23,000 tonnes of garbage, half of it being food scraps, to landfill each year.

Mr Evans said Bayside residents would be able to put food scraps in their green bins most likely from next year.

Bayside council has set a target of 60 per cent reduction in waste sent to landfill by 2020.

Source: The Age