Media conference on public FOGO bins with Councillor Bill Harvey, Hobart City Council, and Emily Briffa, CEO of Hamlet Inc, Hobart, 21 July 2022.
Bill Harvey
Today we’re announcing that we’re going to put some FOGO bins in public places. Now, the City of Hobart has had FOGO bins for a couple of years now. And we’ve also introduced a bylaw, making it compulsory that all of our takeaway packaging is compostable. So what we’ve been encouraging is people to put their compostable packaging into their FOGO bins. And that’s been a success. So now we’re saying that we’re going to put some bins specifically for compostable packaging in public places, and encourage people to put their compostable packaging into those bins rather than into the landfill bin. So the City of Hobart has put those bins up at the Domain at the pizza oven area and also at the athletics track. And we’ve also got bins for compostable packaging up at The Springs on the mountain. So that’s a really great outcome.
This is all part of Hobart becoming an ecologically sustainable city and getting more waste out of landfill. So we’re really enthusiastic about reducing all waste to landfill and getting anything organic out of the landfill bin and into the organics bins.
Nearly every house in Hobart has a FOGO bin. And we encourage them to put their kitchen scraps in with their garden waste, and that gets collected every fortnight. And the city is really pleased to say that we’re now collecting about 4000 tonnes of organic waste via the FOGO bin every year. We’re also hoping now that a lot of people start to put their compostable packaging into the FOGO bin at home but also to use the FOGO bins in public places now. So that means a lot more organic material, such as the compostable packaging, will go to the compost facility rather than to landfill helping us to reduce methane from landfill in the future and to produce valuable compost.
Tasmanian Times
What happens to the material at the composting facility? Where does it eventually end up?
Bill Harvey
Well that compost goes around to the commercial facilities where you can buy compost in bulk.
Journalist – Brianna
(inaudible) costs?
Bill Harvey
No, I don’t have a cost of the FOGO rollout. But I can I can tell you that it will save the ratepayers a lot of money as we go forward. Because in the next four years, we’ll see a $60 rise in landfill levy. We’ve got a new landfill levy, it’s $20, going up to $60 over the next couple of years. So by reducing waste to landfill, we’ll be saving money for the City of Hobart and that’ll help us keep the waste costs down for council and ratepayers.
Tasmanian Times
Council has been a pioneer in some of these areas. Do you find interest coming from other councils in Tasmania about the success of your program?
Bill Harvey
Yes, I get calls all the time from other councils about how we’ve initiated this plastic pollution bylaw that’s got plastic pollution out of the cafes and restaurants around Hobart and other councils are keen to follow suit. But ideally, we’d get the state government to do a statewide ban on single-use plastics. Other states are starting to implement that and we’ve already got single use plastic bans in Western Australia and the ACT and other states are looking at introducing bans in the next couple of years. The Tasmanian Government also needs to investigate how they can phase out and then ban single-use plastics as soon as possible.
Journalist – Brianna
(inaudible)
Bill Harvey
Well, it’s now compulsory that every restaurant and cafe uses compostable packaging. So there’s no more single-use plastic to be used in Hobart. That’s been a huge success. We’ve had really good compliance. We’ve got most if not all food outlets in Hobart on board. And we’ve seen a reduction in single-use plastics of about 600 tonnes a year, which equates to about 10 million pieces of plastic reduced from waste every year. And now we’ve got compostable packaging that can go in the FOGO bin, or can go into the public space compost bins as well, which we now have up at the Domain and also at The Springs. And hopefully that will continue to roll out as we see the success of those pilot bins and whether or not you know they’re succeeding. I hope they are and then we can look at putting more compost bins around the city to help reduce our waste to landfill even further.
Tasmanian Times
Do you think the labelling on packaging is good enough in terms of telling you what is compostable?
Bill Harvey
Labelling is important, but it’s also important that all of the packaging in Hobart is compostable so we can be confident of putting it into the FOGO bin. So that’s where we are we are at the moment. All of the packaging in Hobart is compostable and any business that’s not complying needs to comply but there’s not a lot of businesses that aren’t complying. Most businesses have complied. So while labelling is important in Hobart, you should be able to confidently put your takeaway packaging into your FOGO bin. And now you’ll be able to use the public space bins to put your compostable packaging, but we don’t want to see people contaminating those bins. So just be confident that it’s compostable and if you don’t think it is or if you’re not sure, then put it in the landfill bin.
Journalist – Brianna
This is part of the wider waste strategy, can you touch on that briefly?
Bill Harvey
Council has a waste strategy to get to zero waste to landfill by 2030. And we’re well advanced into that. We’re now down to below 20,000 tonnes of waste going to landfill. And that’s been reduced from about 50,000 tonnes not that long ago. So we’re heading in the right direction. And having compostable packaging is part of that, to continue reducing waste to landfill and diverting any organic wastes to compost facility.
Journalist – Brianna
(inaudible) Plastic-Free July?
Bill Harvey
Well this is our major initiative for Plastic-Free July, to get people to think about what they do with their packaging and be confident that they’ve got compostable packaging and to drop it into those compost bins which are now available up at the Domain if they’re up there playing sport or using the pizza ovens and to also use the bin at The Springs when they’re having a coffee and drop their coffee cup into those compostable bins. We can assure you that it will go to a compost facility and be turned into a valuable product in compost.
Emily Briffa
Emily Briffa, I’m the CEO of Hamlet incorporated. At the cafe we use all 100% compostable packaging, including our takeaway coffee cups which are actually compostable in your home garden in seven days, we get them from I Am Not Paper.
We also compost at home. We have our own composting system. So all the waste that comes through the kitchen, including any food wastage, goes into the compost.
Journalist – Brianna
(inaudible)
Emily Briffa
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. I know that they’ve been doing that for a while in Melbourne, and it works really well. I think it’s a great initiative because I suppose the thing we always find is, even though we do everything we can to have compostable packaging, if there’s not a compost bin to put it in, that’s accessible to people who are getting takeaways, that doesn’t really solve the problem. So I think having some more compost bins around the CBD would also be a great initiative if that’s on the agenda.
Tasmanian Times
What’s customer feedback been like on the compostables?
Emily Briffa
It’s all been really positive for us, which has been great. Especially with our takeaway cups. I suppose it’s been an interesting thing for us over the last two years because during COVID we had to stop using the keeps cup so we decided to stop using keep cups to keep our staff safe. So having a compostable takeaway cup that people knew they could compost at home was really well received by all of our customers.
Journalist – Brianna
Are they more expensive?
Emily Briffa
They’re more expensive for us to buy, yes. And you can only get them from Melbourne, so we pay a lot in shipping. But it’s a decision that we’ve made because we really want to be as sustainable as possible as a cafe so it’s just a burden that we have to cop the cost of.
Journalist – Brianna
(inaudible)
Emily Briffa
I think the more and more cafes that started to use cups like this the the price will drop especially with the shipping because there’s not a distributor in Tasmania at the moment. If more cafes came on board we’d be able to get a distributor down here.
Now we brought back our keep cups now so people can bring their keep cups in. We did used to have a mug library that was a great sort of initiative. We’re looking at potentially, you know with everything that’s going on with COVID, we’re not going to bring that back straightaway but hopefully in the future we’ll be able to again.
