Ash Turner sizes up a four-metre-high, 60-tonne mound of food waste and garden rubbish and points out the problematic interlopers amid the grass clippings, hedge trimmings, mango seeds, calla lilies and biodegradable bags full of food.
“So that’s a biodegradable bag … that’s not … that’s oversized,” he says, pointing to a tree stump that will be too big to be broken down by the various machines in the plant.
Turner, the state manager for resource recovery at Cleanaway, spots a black plastic bag filled with grass clippings.
“That’s rubbish that won’t break down. That’s rubbish,” he says, pointing to a bag full of plastic wrappers, coffee cups and milk bottles, some of which could have been recycled.
“So you can see that we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Turner estimates this pile – which will be processed that night at Cleanaway Organics Eastern Creek, a waste treatment facility in western Sydney – is about eight to 10 trucks’ worth of food organics garden organics (Fogo), collected from Fairfield council’s green bins.
It is part of one of the biggest initiatives undertaken in Australia to address the enormous problem of food waste.
By 1 July 2030 all councils in New South Wales – the country’s most populous state – will be required to provide household Fogo collection. More than 40 councils across Sydney and the regions have already done so. The aim is to halve the amount of organics going to landfill by 2030.
The NSW government estimates that up to 45% of waste thrown away in red bins is food waste, with 1.2m tonnes of food waste going to landfill each year.
Every tonne of organic waste diverted from landfill saves 1.5 tonnes of CO2 from being emitted. The not-for-profit Project Drawdown lists reducing food waste as one of the most effective ways to reduce global emissions.
The facility at Eastern Creek, purchased by Cleanaway in 2022, shows the state’s shift in waste processing in microcosm.
It currently processes mostly red bin waste and a small amount of Fogo (30,000 tonnes a year) – but over the next few years the plan is that Fogo will become the main, and then the sole, waste treated at the plant. That would mean taking in 300,000 tonnes of Fogo a year.
It’s something Turner is passionate about.
“I cannot wait until this place is 100% Fogo and we’re making a genuinely beneficial product that we can put into agriculture and it actually does some good. That’s what floats my boat.”
The Terminator and the ‘incompatibles’
The pile of Fogo sits in the “receivables hall” after being dumped by the garbage trucks of western Sydney. From there it will be moved on to the facility’s conveyor belts, which whiz around the plant at remarkable speed.
The Fogo travels through a machine called the Terminator that splits open bin bags, then past four men in a “sorting cabin” who pull “incompatibles” off the line and into a pile destined for landfill – the tree stump will come off the conveyor belt here, Turner says.
The rest moves through different machines, including a shredder, various screens to separate larger pieces, and a wind system, which separates waste by weight. The “alchemy section” uses magnets to remove any metal, before the waste makes its way to a giant compost hall, 50 metres wide and 209 metres long.
There, the waste will sit and cook for two weeks, kept at a temperature of 55-60C and regularly sprayed with water to keep it at 50% moisture. It will be turned by giant augers, until the result is a rich, brown compost, that undergoes one more round of sorting (into a machine called the “refinery” that screens out objects bigger than 10mm) before it becomes compost for agriculture.
Currently Cleanaway compost is shipped to farms in Oberon and Molong, 180km and 290km west of Sydney respectively, though Turner says the cost of transport is one of the big sticking points in the process.
“Apart from getting a significant yield increase, we’re also getting organic material back in the ground,” he says. “Ideally we’d get to farmland that’s somewhat denuded and then … we’ll also start the process of rebuilding the stability and the organic base of the soil, which would be very idealistic, but it would be a pretty fantastic story.”
A few waste bugbears
Turner has a few waste bugbears. Batteries, which are the source of regular fires in the waste system; plastic bags used unnecessarily; badly sorted recycling; and apple stickers.
“It’s a problem,” he says firmly. “They don’t break down.”
Because fruit and vegetable stickers are often smaller than the fine sieve used on the compost (10mm) they make it through the refinery. Because they are soft plastics, and the compost these facilities produce is allowed to contain only 0.05% of soft plastics to be compliant, the stickers add up.
“Those little labels, they contribute a lot. If everybody leaves their fruit stickers on all their fruit … that’d create a horrible contamination.”
Turner is also exercised by the green bags used for food waste, which are required by many councils. Some councils supply bags, which he says are fine. But he says that some of the ones sold at the supermarket are not compostable and will break down into microplastics that are then ploughed into the soil along with the compost.
“So they’ll say ‘biodegradable compost liner’ … but they’re not necessarily biodegradable,” he says. So do they break down? “Yes, they do, but do they compost and break down into an organic? No, they don’t.”
A NSW Environment Protection Authority spokesperson said that “certified compostable plastic kitchen caddy liners comply with Australian standards, meaning they can fully break down when appropriately processed at a commercial composting facility”.
The dramatic collapse of RedCycle revealed that many Australians had been sorting and returning soft plastics only to discover the recycling pathway had broken down and they were instead being warehoused. Understandably that left many sceptical about recycling, as did multiple investigations into where recycling waste is shipped and what becomes of it.
Does it really matter if someone is careful in their sorting of waste?
Turner is adamant that it does, and says his 20 years in the waste business have changed his own behaviour.
“I’m far more careful with batteries, far more careful with recycling. I’m making sure when I’m mowing the lawns that what the lawnmower runs over should actually be in the green bin. If I’m doing the gardening and I’ve tipped out a bag of compost, I don’t throw the bag in the green bin. Making sure the right things go in the right places.”
He refuses to put fruit and vegetables into plastic bags at the supermarket. Does saving five to six plastic bags a week really help?
“So, five to six bags a week,” he says. “Let’s say 3 million [people in Sydney] do the shopping each week. You do the math from there.” (I do, it’s 780-936m plastic bags a year.)
“And that’s not recycling, that’s waste. It’s a single-use product made from a petrochemical that effectively goes to landfill and has no value from that point on.”
“It also makes you aware of how much waste we have in the environment,” he says. Over more than 20 years working across all the state’s major waste companies, he says he’s seen just how much we throw away, from car seats to clothing, to once, he says grimly, a dead pony.
“Textiles is the next big waste frontier,” he says, “it’s basically impossible to recycle.
“Just seeing the amount of materials, good materials, that we waste is really quite sad. So that’s why getting into a process where we’re actually adding value out of the process is such a good thing.
“It’s a collective,” he says. “Industry can’t solve the problem by itself. The community actually has to get behind the government … behind the industry and start changing its behaviours.”
