Environment – The food scrap debate

Almost weekly I see Auckland Council’s Rukenga Kai Food Scrap collection debated, critiqued, celebrated or complained about online or around me. 

As someone who has spent years teaching kids about composting, recruiting businesses to divert food scraps, and being a backyard worm farmer and composter, it’s time to weigh in; diverting food from landfill to compost is always, always a good thing. 

As of November last year, nine million kgs of food scraps have been collected through the Council service and last year the government committed to making food scrap collection available to all urban areas in NZ by 2030. 

A common misconception is that food scraps break down in landfills. Organic material needs a specific level of oxygen (depending whether it’s an anaerobic or aerobic system), microbiology and temperature to break down. Therefore organics do not break down fully in landfill and instead create methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, much stronger than CO2. To add to that, a recent study by Love Food Hate Waste found that on average, 40 percent of rubbish in Auckland households’ weekly rubbish bins could be diverted from landfill and a big part of that is organics.

Food scraps are not waste, they are a resource, and we should be treating them as such. Landfills are finite holes in the ground and once they fill up, we look for more land to fill with our waste. Separating food from rubbish is one of the most simple, effective and impactful ways to combat climate change and reduce our emissions, especially if those food scraps are turned into compost and used to grow food, or fed to animals.

Our food scraps end up at an Ecogas anaerobic digestor (AD) where they are processed into fertiliser for farmland and biofuel to heat T&G Fresh glass houses. They leave Auckland on trucks that bring goods to Auckland and would otherwise be making the return journey empty. There are plans to build another AD in Auckland in the future. Ecogas holds a 20-year contract to process Auckland’s food scraps. This is currently the best large-scale facility we have in the country but I would love to see more localised options like City to Farm and community gardens supported to expand and take more residential food scraps. 

We pay around $70 for this annually in our rates. At the moment it is mandatory though there is support for an opt-out option in the future. Some of my rates also go to paying for libraries, a service that I do not use all the time but am happy to pay for. One of the perks of the council service is that it takes all food scraps, unlike worm farms and smaller compost systems. Many people, my household included, use a mixture of a home compost system and the council bins for things that would take too long to break down in a backyard compost, like fish and animal bones. 

If we look at the waste hierarchy, reduction or avoidance of waste altogether is always the best option but if you have organic waste, then the best things you can do are: feed it to animals, compost it at home or locally, compost it at a central facility to make power or fertiliser (which Ecogas does), and then right down the bottom is landfill. 

The majority of people do not compost and this service is a convenient, relatively cheap, option that will allow and encourage many people who have never separated their organics before, to start, which is a huge win. 

If you can compost at home – wonderful, please do that. If you can’t but can compost locally, please do that. If the council collection service is the most feasible and convenient option, please use it instead of letting your valuable food scraps fill up holes in our earth.