Lithgow City Council is adding a green ‘FOGO’ bin to your kerbside bin service.
FOGO stands for Food Organics and Garden Organics and means that the new green bin will collect both food scraps and garden waste every week.
The new green bin service will start in March 2024. Your red and yellow bin services will stay the same. The green bin will be collected every week, together with your red bin.
Council’s data shows that, at present, food and garden plants fills more than half of our red bins.
This is important because the food and garden waste in landfill rots and generates methane. This is not only a waste of landfill space, but also harmful to the environment and the nutrients in the food and garden waste are lost.
By taking food and garden plant waste out of the red lid bin as FOGO, it can be collected and professionally processed into compost, which benefits soils.
Mayor, Maree Statham, said ’The green ‘FOGO’ bin service is a key part of Council’s commitment to delivering best practice waste services to our residents. Our community is committed to protecting the local environment while supporting the local economy and this new service is an outstanding example of Council delivering on both these priorities.
Recycling food and garden waste preserves our landfill space and prevents the harm to the environment that occurs when food and plants are buried in landfill and cannot decompose properly and the strong community support for this new service is very encouraging.’
Council successfully applied for support through the NSW Environment Protection Authority’s (NSW EPA) Go FOGO grants, to make it easy for households to recycle food and plants, instead of wasting these still valuable materials in landfill.
The food and garden waste in the green bin will be taken to a commercial processing facility in Blayney and be turned into compost and other soil conditioners that are in demand for use in agriculture and horticulture as well for use on sports fields, parks and gardens.
Council will deliver, to your home, everything you need to get started with the new service. The green bin, a kitchen caddy and a guide to using the service will be delivered from January to February 2024, so households will be ready to start using the new service in the week commencing 4 March 2024.
For more information visit:
- Council’s website at: https://council.lithgow.com/waste-recycling/fogo/
- Council’s Facebook page and
- Council Connections online newsletter.
