Hey Northern Rivers – good compost starts with you
Recycling food and garden waste into quality compost is easy when you have a green bin. All Councils in the Northern Rivers region offer a green bin service to urban residents (Ballina Shire, Byron Shire, Clarence Valley, Kyogle, Lismore City, Richmond Valley and Tweed Shire).
A little scrap goes a long way
The compost produced from our community’s green bins is used by local farmers to nourish the soil, that grows the food that’s sold at local farmers markets and shops. This food ultimately ends up on the plates of many local families across our region, completing the full cycle.
This food-cycle can keep coming ‘round as long as we use our green bins correctly, and keep all food and garden waste from going into our landfill bins!
It’s a scrap-load better for our environment too!
For residents with a green bin service, using it correctly is a simple way each and every one of us can contribute towards a better environment. Recycling food and garden waste saves water and energy, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. When food and garden waste is sent to a closed system such as landfill, it creates a toxic liquid called leachate and methane; a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2.
In 2024-2025, householders across the Northern Rivers collectively diverted more than 47,000 tonnes of food and garden waste from landfill by using their green bins. This is a fantastic combined effort achieved by our community, however during this period a further 17,000 tonnes of green waste was lost to landfill through the residential red bin, and over 12,000 tonnes of this was food waste.
We’re doing Scrap Better
Did you know that these items can’t go in your FOGO bin even if they have this label?
- No coffee cups or lids
- No paper trays
- No pizza boxes
- No burger boxes
- No Cardboard
- No shredded paper
- No serviettes, paper towels or tissues
- No newspaper (unless it’s used to wrap your food scraps in)
Why? The label say’s its compostable.
The NSW Government have recently tested many of these items and found chemicals and microplastics that don’t make our compost healthy. You can still choose to compost these at home in your home compost, however, they are not for your kerbside green-lid FOGO bin, or for our commercial compost facilities in NSW.
For further information about state government regulations on FOGO go to: https://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/Your-environment/Recycling-and-reuse/household-recycling-overview/FOGO-information-for-households