Earlier this month, LOCCAL had the pleasure of hosting a Taiwanese delegation who got in contact with LOCCAL to find out about community composting in Australia. They were interested in seeing first-hand what kind of initiatives are in place and how they work. Acting Mayor Chiu, Chen-Yuan and Environment Bureau Director Chiang Sheng-Jen visited Sydney, where LOCCAL representatives Ashley Wearne and Michael Mobbs show them around two different composting approaches in action. Their visit came at a time of growing international interest in localised food waste solutions, and it offered a valuable opportunity for cross-cultural knowledge sharing.

Report by Ashley Wearne

At a recent waste industry conference in Sydney, we the audience of journalists, academics and waste management and recycling staff got to ask the panels of processing companies, the industry alliance, the government regulators and policymakers, all our questions about where things are at in Australia’s ‘war on waste’. 

We heard that PFAS and microplastics are still causing problems for our somewhat mid-range technologies, that we are still only processing half our food waste while the rest goes to landfill, and that we have inadequate time to install the processing capacity needed to end landfill by our imposed deadline of 2030. The small handful of waste processing companies that have often been specializing in the logistics of transporting waste rather than processing it, have advised their government counterparts that they require signed contracts with big concession areas and long terms to unlock the investments they need for land, plant and specialized staff.

While we grapple with these issues and find ourselves with one less year of time, the cheapest and best options are reducing, and we find ourselves in more of a scramble than a strategic planning dialog. What might have been a weaning process of transitioning from (a dependence on) waste export to countries like Thailand and China, to recycling and processing waste into various resources onshore, turned out to be an icy cold plunge into an industry that our players are only partially covering.

Against this backdrop, there is a glaring absence of discussion and exchange with international partners. Given its massive contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and soil and water pollution, food waste management is a top priority for national and city governments far and wide. But apart from asking foreign companies to buy our waste or process it for us, we are not seeing the kind of peer learning you would expect from local policymakers.

The issue with this is that Australian waste processing strategies have been fairly rigid and uninspired, given our relatively rich position in terms of space and finance. At Sydney’s industry conference, we heard without a trace of irony that the mere allowance to throw food waste into the green bin under the FOGO campaign has been the biggest change in Australia’s waste management landscape since the introduction of the yellow recycling bin in 2006, and that this in itself has been an enormous challenge in national behavioural adjustment; the resulting contamination of green bin contents has created a problem for processors as their compost regularly comes out unfit for the ideal applications.

Meanwhile some communities overseas are separating their waste into 12 different streams and processing it all on an island of 588 square kilometres and 40,000 residents – take Bornholm in Denmark.

At the other end of the spectrum, a few countries, even in Europe, rely almost purely on landfill without separation, and others still are in a position of highly advanced and expensive sorting and processing technology, reducing the burden of separation on residents.

In the Asia-Pacific region, a strong manufacturing sector has been a cornerstone of waste processing models, as this creates demand for the types of resources that can be recovered from various streams of waste. Taiwan has been at the global forefront of waste recycling for three decades. It was an enormous effort to redirect all the waste generated by such a rapidly growing economy, but the small island’s landfill situation was so dire in the early 1990s, that the nickname ‘garbage island’ came into vernacular.

Taiwanese cities are now able to recover close to 100% of waste, and this is achieved through a policymaker’s tour de force of innovative approaches including resident-return recycling programs, consumption reduction strategies, commercial cost-sharing (waste tax), and strong community involvement in collection. While non-recyclable waste incineration has played a significant role, the Taiwanese have been early adopters on waste-to-energy technology, allowing them to expand and improve their incinerators’ efficiency and standards beyond other countries’.

The Taiwanese government is also known to go beyond international standards when it comes to building international partnerships to innovate and exchange on education, technology and research, as well as cultural and community issues. This spirit of collaboration saw Hsinchu City Government visiting Sydney in September, where delegates including Acting Mayor Chiu, Chen-Yuan and Environment Bureau Director Chiang, Sheng-Jen explored different approaches to community composting of food waste. Prior to their trip, the delegation organisers reached out to LOCCAL and arranged to meet two local community composters in Sydney. 

Ashley Wearne showed the delegation around a food relief operation at Addison Road Community Organisation in the Inner West, which collects unsold food from supermarkets for social distribution. An efficient three-bay compost system installed by Ashley and his team of volunteers processes remaining food waste to produce compost for the public green space surrounding the food pantry, which is used by the local community for cultural events, environmental education and social gatherings.

Michael Mobbs demonstrated another approach which targets small businesses in nearby Chippendale. Here his team has installed Cool Seats with local cafes and restaurants, attractive raised garden beds with integrated worm farms for simple processing of commercial kitchen scraps.

Acting Mayor Chiu has expressed interest in long-term collaboration to advance food circularity and community sustainability, and an aim to turn Hsinchu into an Asian demonstration city where technology and community action work towards net-zero. Issues around regulation, community engagement and operational models were tabled in the onsite meetings and follow-up invitations extended for the community composters to visit Taiwan to learn more.

LOCCAL is deeply encouraged by the initiative shown by the Hsinchu City Government in seeking collaboration on community composting. Their willingness to explore grassroots solutions alongside technological innovations is inspiring, and we look forward to building on this first exchange. We hope this marks the beginning of an ongoing partnership that strengthens community composting efforts across borders and helps advance food circularity for both our regions.