Unanimous Councillor support for Chippendale community plan
On Monday 23 June 2025 Sydney City Councillors voted unanimously to support the Chippendale Community Action Plan proposed by Friends of Chippendale. The plan can be downloaded here. (You can watch the presentation to Councillors on that link, too.)
See more details on https://loccal.org/2025/07/09/unanimous-councillor-support-for-chippendale-community-plan/
Looking for inspiration for your community compost system?
There are so many examples of people closing the loop and building community around the country. Get inspiration and view other example videos from around Australia featured in the media and online here: #CommunityCompostingClips.
If you have videos suggestions of great initiatives please send them through to info@loccal.org
Watch: Yes, In My Backyard (YIMBY) Composters in Castlemaine via Gardening Australia
Gardening Australia visits Castlemaine to find about YIMBY, a unique community composting approach that processes over 150 kgs of food scraps per week and aims to challenge industrial trends of removing organics from landfill by building skills and connections locally.
More details on https://loccal.org/2025/07/13/watch-yes-in-my-backyard-yimby-composters-in-castlemaine-via-gardening-australia/
Watch: Semaphore Compost Network featured on Gardening Australia
Gardening Australia visits a community compost network in Semaphore, South Australia, where cafes and gardeners have organised a face to face, old school, super local, compost collection network that is closing the loop on food waste while building soils.
Details on https://loccal.org/2025/07/20/watch-semaphore-compost-network-featured-on-gardening-australia/
Watch: Neighbourhood community composting in Brisbane featured on ABCs War on Waste
War on Waste‘s Craig Reucassel visits a community compost hub in Hannah’s front yard in suburban Brisbane. You can also read more here!
What’s on in August
Soil, compost, zero waste, climate action, regenerative and urban agriculture – you are sure to find something on in your neck of the woods on our continually updated What’s on Guide. Here are a few examples from around the country:
New South Wales:
Join Compost Queen Ernie Harbott for Coffee & Compost at 11am on the first Saturday of each month (this month is 2 August) at the Parkview Cafe in Singleton. The event is a social gathering focused on composting and community connection, where people can discuss and share their composting experiences, swap compost, and learn from each other. The event also welcomes children and those interested in learning about composting. Read more here
Western Australia:
Kim Frankowiak from Great Southern Living Soils will facilitate a series of educational and practical Busy Bee Community Compost Hub sessions at Denmark Kwoorabup Community Garden located behind the Denmark Community Resource Centre in Denmark Western Australia. Upcoming dates are August 1, 15, 29 and September 12 & 26. Read more here. ,
Victoria
Join Michael Mobbs and the team for the first Worms at Work assembly, installation, and training on the morning of 8 August at ST. ALi Cafe and Roasters, Port Melbourne. This is part of a wider Worms at Work trial in partnership with the City of Melbourne to test design options in the streets to turn food waste into fresh growth by integrating street furniture with public worm-farming and composting. Read more here.
Australian Capital Territory:
ANU has its own community composting hub – Worms Against Waste – and their next working bee is on August 20 where they will be collecting and adding collected components to the compost bay – and learning about how the compost works. You don’t need any special knowledge or skills to be part of it – you can help by simply shredding office paper, collecting garden weeds or raking leaves. Afterwards share a yummy afternoon tea of warm soup and bread! More details here.
Queensland:
Community Gardens Australia State Gathering will be held at Northey Street City Farm on August 23. It is a day to dig into inspiration, learn and celebrate everything we adore about growing, greening and going sustainable. LOCCAL will have an information stall there if you would like to connect with us personally and there will be lots of great speakers and activities including Clarence Slockee, Leonie Shanahan, Arno King, Gavin Hardy and a workshop on how and why to brew aerated compost tea by Doreen Jachmann. More details here
South Australia
The Semaphore Compost Network gets together on the last Thursday of each month at Largs Pier Hotel in Largs Bay with dinner to follow at 6:30 (this month is 28 August). The Semaphore Compost Network is a coalition of businesses, schools, backyard gardeners & community gardens in and around Semaphore and Port Adelaide. More details here
Tasmania
Gardners Bay Farm is running a Composting, Teas & Extracts – Building a Johnson-Su Bioreactor workshop on August 31. They will cover: Traditional Composting, Aerobic Thermal Composting, Vermicomposting, Compost Teas & Extracts and how to Build Your Own Johnson-Su Bio-Reactor. More details here
Check out our What’s on Guide for more events and workshops. If you are aware of any other relevant events and would like to see them featured on our What’s on Guide please send details to us at info@loccal.org
Knowledge sharing from around the world
Connections: How-To Guide To Measure Soil Carbon Storage
This guide walks you through measuring changes in carbon in soils amended with compost. The added carbon storage may not be something you can calculate after your first compost application.
Sally Brown
Compost has been rightfully seen as one of the best tools we have to increase carbon in soils. I’ve talked and talked some more about the benefits associated with enriching soils with organic matter. One thing I haven’t talked about is how you actually measure soil carbon. This is pretty inexpensive and easy to do.
Measuring the organic matter concentration in soils is referring to organic carbon (the backbone or about 58% of soil organic matter). You can measure the percentage of carbon (C) in a soil with a soil sample taken from the horizon of interest by combustion. This will give you the total C as well as the total nitrogen (N) in the soil. It will not distinguish between inorganic C (carbon in carbonate minerals) and organic matter C. That is not normally an issue in agricultural soils. While the test can’t be done at home, it is a fast, cheap and easy measure. Any number of soil testing labs can do this. Any lab that tests your compost for the US Composting Council’s Seal of Testing Assurance (STA) compliance will be able to do this test.
More details https://www.biocycle.net/how-to-guide-to-measure-soil-carbon-storage/
What’s happening around the world
Maine Passes Food Waste Ban
In June, Maine became the final New England state to pass legislation banning the disposal of food waste in landfills or incineration facilities. The original version of LD 1065, An Act Regarding the Reduction and Recycling of Food Waste, was introduced in March 2025 and required generators of more than 2 tons/week on average to stop disposing of food waste via landfill or incineration by July 1, 2027, provided they are within 20 miles of an organics recycling facility with capacity to accept the generator’s food waste. In that original version, the ban expanded to generators of 1 ton/week of food waste within 25 miles of a processing facility on July 1, 2029, and allowed for the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to adopt rules reducing the food waste amounts and proximity to organics recyclers to include more generators no earlier than July 1, 2032. The version of LD 1065 that became law in June pushed back the ban’s rollout by three years, with generators of 2 tons/week of food waste within 20 miles of an organics recycling facility not required to divert until July 1, 2030. This means Maine’s largest food waste generators and its few organics recycling facilities have five full years to come into compliance.
More details on https://www.biocycle.net/maine-passes-food-waste-ban/
Washington, D.C. Rolls Out “Smart” Food Scraps Drop-Off Bins
Food scraps drop-off at farmers markets in the District of Columbia (DC) started in 2017 in the city’s eight wards. To expand accessibility, the DC Department of Public Works (DPW) began installing 30 metroStor smart drop-off bins in February 2025 throughout the District. To test the concept prior to city-wide rollout, a pilot bin was set up on the George Washington University campus in July 2024; about 600 users registered to use the bin from July 2024 to February 2025. To receive feedback on where residents thought the smart bins should be installed in their community, DPW hosted community engagement meetings in all eight wards. Locations were ultimately chosen to ensure accessibility for all residents, particularly those residing in multi-family properties, such as apartment buildings and condominiums.
More details on https://www.biocycle.net/washington-d-c-rolls-out-smart-food-scraps-drop-off-bins/
Community composting in City of Mechelen, Belgium
Across the European Union, somewhere between 118 and 138 million tons of bio-waste are generated every year, of which currently only about 40% is effectively recycled into high-quality compost and digestate. National, regional and local governments are required to provide separate collection or recycling of biowaste at the source under the revised Waste Framework Directive. As up to 50% of municipal solid waste is organic, the bio-waste fraction plays an important role in the transition to circular economy and contributes significantly to meeting the overall recycling target of 65% by 2035. Composting is presently the dominant form of bio-waste recycling in the EU. Supporting home composting, as shown in this good practice, is especially useful for homes with gardens, but the compost can also be used in shared urban gardens. The success of the Mechelen practice shows the importance of good communication, educational workshops for the public and financial support given to citizens to undertake climate action. The good practice can be easily adopted in other regions.
More details on https://www.interregeurope.eu/good-practices/community-composting-0
Neighborhood composting with environmental, social and financial benefits
Extremely large amounts of organic waste is produced across Europe, which is recorded among the top polluters; For instance, Greece is the 5th largest producer of food waste in Europe producing 87 kg/per person at household level annually (source: Food Waste Index Report 2024). The sustainable utilization of organic waste is of utmost importance, to minimize the wide range of negative effects connected with inefficient management of this stream and to take advantage of its added value.
More details https://biorural.eu/neighborhood-composting-with-environmental-social-and-financial-benefits/
In the village of Thrupp, where houses are spread out over steep winding roads in the narrow Frome Valley, it’s difficult for lorries to get through to collect garden waste.
It leaves some people with the choice of lengthy car trips to a nearby town to take their green waste to a facility, or burning their rubbish in small bonfires that have prompted many irate social media posts.
“The system we have in place currently isn’t very good for our neighbourhood,” said Shelley Tester, a director of Brimscombe and Thrupp Community Composters (Batcom), which has been working to find a local – and more sustainable – solution to the problem.
‘People feel a sense of ownership’: the growth of community composting
Residents will have their garden waste turned into compost that scheme members can use to enrich their soil at home. Photograph: Martin Phelps
Instead of burning or transporting their garden waste, residents of an English village built their own composting site
Community Composting Group Fünfhaus, Austria
Members of the community composting group collect their organic waste and compost it together. In introductory workshops, practical care activities for the compost and exchange meetings they learn about composting and its backgrounds. In the end they harvest the compost together, share it and use it as fertiliser for their plants at home or in urban gardening activities.
Spearheading Community Composting Of Food Waste In China
Through nearly five years of experiments, approximately 50 communities located in 22 provinces throughout China have participated in a national community composting program. Nearly half have continued.
Xuehua Zhang
China has a long history of composting in its agriculture sector. Farmers composted animal waste together with human waste and agricultural residuals then applied the finished compost to soil for producing food. In recent years, as disposal of solid waste has increasingly become a major problem in China, some cities and counties started building centralized, large-scale municipal composting facilities, mostly for handling biosolids and manures. In the 1990s, there were initiatives to use composting to recycle urban food waste, but those failed primarily due to unseparated food waste that contaminated the quality of the finished compost. No evidence exists of meaningful on-site composting of food waste in urban communities before 2017, although source separation of food waste was tried in various places but never really succeeded. The general perception was that composting could not take place in a highly populated urban community in China and it would likely encounter public resistance. What is also true is the dislike of composting in rural residential areas where semi-urbanization has taken place.
More details on https://www.biocycle.net/community-composting-food-waste-china
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