AORA raises concern over FOGO contamination

The transition taking place to Food Organics, Garden Organics (FOGO) at the local government level is not without challenges – the contamination rate of feedstock is an ongoing concern in the organics recycling industry.

Broadly, this transition is important for many reasons, most notably, diversion of organics away from landfill has significant benefits to the environment.   

In 2021-22, the Australian Organics Recycling Association (AORA) Capacity of the Australian Organics Recycling Industry report indicated that Australia had an organics recycling rate of 52.3 per cent, equivalent to 7739 kilotons of organic material being processed and, equally important, diverted away from landfill.  This rate of organic recycling has been increasing by 2.4 per cent year-on-year over the past decade. 

In addition to the important economic contributions of the Australian organics recycling industry, the total estimated greenhouse gas emissions savings from organic recycling of materials in Australia in 2021-22 is about 3.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to planting 5.8 million trees or taking 902,311 cars off the road to achieve the same savings. 

John McKew, National Executive Officer of AORA, says a greater level of organic recycling through the introduction of FOGO is a good thing for the environment, but there are caveats. 

The rate of contamination (non-organic material in the FOGO feedstock stream) is an ongoing concern. Removing this contamination is difficult and costly for organics processors and it is impossible to achieve complete removal.   

“Removal of contamination from FOGO at an organics processing facility is largely a manual process, requiring people standing at a conveyor belt picking contamination out of a steady stream of materials moving past them,” John says.  

“We are not at the stage of machines or Artificial Intelligence (AI) being able to do this – yet. The human eye is still the best detector of visible contamination.” 

He says that problems will continue until there is a shared understanding and responsibility for contamination. And by shared, this means households, councils, collection, organic processors, governments and the regulators.   

“Contamination is not the problem of organic processors alone and nor is the solution,” he says. 

“If we cannot collectively work to solve the contamination problem, the problem could easily become one where there is no other solution but to send it back to landfill and the environment continues to suffer from increasing greenhouse gases.  

“And we must be able to do better than that?” 

The other caveat of note is the products produced from the organics processing sector – compost, mulches and soil conditioners. These products are important as this is the commercial component of the Australian recycling industry – how the money is made – which allows these businesses to continue to operate, employ, invest and pay taxes (the economic contribution alluded to earlier).   

These products are also increasingly important inputs to Australia’s agriculture, horticulture and viticulture sectors.   

The products from organic recycling increasingly help to grow the food Australia needs and, not surprisingly, these producers want high-quality compost, mulches and soil conditioners to ensure production of quality products that they can sell.