Blog
At a recent waste industry conference in Sydney, we the audience of journalists, academics and waste management and recycling staff got to ask the panels of processing companies, the industry alliance, the government regulators and policymakers, all our questions about where things are at in Australia’s ‘war on waste’.
We heard that PFAS and microplastics are still causing problems for our somewhat mid-range processing technologies, that we are still only processing half our food waste while the rest goes to landfill, and that we have inadequate time to install the processing capacity needed to end landfill by our imposed deadline of 2030. The small handful of waste processing companies that have often been specializing in the logistics of transporting waste, rather than fully processing it, have government that they require signed contracts with big concession areas and long terms to unlock the investments they need for land, plant and specialized staff.
While we grapple with these issues and find ourselves with one less year of time, the cheapest and best options are reducing, and we find ourselves in more of a scramble than a strategic planning dialog. What might have been a weaning process of transitioning from (a dependence on) waste export to countries like Thailand and China, to recycling and processing waste into various resources onshore, turned out to be an icy cold plunge into an industry that our domestic players are only partially covering.
Against this backdrop, we need more discussion and exchange with international partners and a little less attention on the lucrative panacea of ‘compostable plastic’. Given its massive contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and soil and water pollution, food waste management is a top priority for countries worldwide. But apart from asking foreign companies to buy our waste or process it for us, we are not seeing the kind of peer learning you would expect from local policymakers, and industry has not shown as much demand to get into this space as we had hoped.
Historically, Australian waste processing strategies have been fairly rigid, given our relatively rich position in terms of space and finance. At Sydney’s industry conference, we heard that the mere allowance to throw food waste into the green bin (happening in other countries for decades) under the FOGO campaign has been the biggest change in Australia’s waste management landscape since the introduction of the yellow recycling bin in 2006, and that this in itself has been an enormous challenge in behavioural adjustment; the resulting contamination of green bin contents has created a problem for processors as their compost regularly comes out unfit for the ideal applications like agriculture and parks.
Meanwhile some communities overseas are separating their waste into 12 different streams and processing it all on an island of 588 square kilometres and 40,000 residents – take Bornholm in Denmark.
(Bornholm’s waste recycling company’s separation flyer.)
At the other end of the spectrum, a few countries, even in Europe, rely almost purely on landfill without separation, and others still are in a position of highly advanced and expensive sorting and processing technology, reducing the burden of separation on residents.
In the Asia-Pacific region, a strong manufacturing sector has been a cornerstone of waste processing models, creating demand for the types of resources that can be recovered from various streams of waste. Taiwan has been at the global forefront of waste recycling for three decades. It was an enormous effort to redirect all the waste generated by such a rapidly growing economy, but the small island’s landfill situation was so dire in the early 1990s, that the nickname ‘garbage island’ had come into vernacular.
Taiwanese cities are now able to recover close to 100% of waste, and this is achieved through a policymaker’s tour de force of innovative approaches including resident-return recycling programs, consumption reduction strategies, commercial cost-sharing (waste tax), and strong community involvement in collection. While non-recyclable waste incineration has played a significant role, the Taiwanese have been early adopters on waste-to-energy technology, allowing them to expand and improve their incinerators’ efficiency and standards beyond other countries’.
The Taiwanese government is also known to go beyond international standards when it comes to building international partnerships to innovate and exchange on education, technology and research, as well as cultural and community issues. This spirit of collaboration saw Hsinchu City Government visiting Sydney in September, where delegates including Acting Mayor Chiu, Chen-Yuan and Environment Bureau Director Chiang, Sheng-Jen explored different approaches to community composting of food waste. Prior to their trip, the delegation organisers reached out to Australia’s recently established Local Community Compost Alliance (LOCCAL) and arranged to visit community composters in Sydney.
The delegation joined me for a tour around the food rescue relief operation at Addison Road Community Organisation in the Inner West, which collects unsold food from supermarkets for social distribution. We installed an efficient three-bay compost system here with help from volunteers, which now processes remaining food waste and other onsite organics to produce compost for the public green space surrounding the food pantry, which is used by the local community for cultural events, environmental education and social gatherings.
(Hsinchu City Government delegation inspects a three-bay compost system for processing food waste at Addison Road Community Organisation)
My fellow LOCCAL co-founder and Sydney local Michael Mobbs demonstrated another approach which targets small businesses in nearby Chippendale. There his team has installed Cool Seats with local cafes and restaurants, attractive raised garden beds with integrated worm farms for simple processing of commercial kitchen scraps.
Acting Mayor Chiu has expressed interest in long-term collaboration to advance food circularity and community sustainability, and an aim to turn Hsinchu into an Asian demonstration city where technology and community action work towards net-zero. Issues around regulation, community engagement and operational models were tabled in the onsite meetings and follow-up invitations extended for the community composters to visit Taiwan to learn more.
The chance to exchange with other countries in our region brings so much innovation and partnership potential, and it is not just the policymakers and consultants who can benefit from opportunities like this. Communities, take for example Taiwanese urban residents, have often been a driving force for change when it comes to setting ambitious climate policy and industry regulation. With our city lives rapidly heading towards a more dense and less green standard of living, the chance to look at the way other cities are approaching urban ecology, waste management, recycling and other infrastructure services is an essential part of the process.
September 24, 2025
June 5, 2024
May 6, 2024
January 3, 2024