Auckland kerbside food waste collections a step closer with contract signing

Thursday, 5 December 2019

Auckland Council has signed a new contract with New Zealand company Ecogas to turn the city's household food waste into biofuel and liquid bio-fertiliser.

Kerbside collections for household food waste will be rolled out across Auckland within two years after Auckland Council signed a new contract today with NZ company Ecogas.

The company will convert the waste into biofuel and liquid bio-fertiliser.

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It follows a trial which started in Papakura last year and covered 17,000 households. The region-wide rollout was supposed to happen next year, but has now been delayed until 2021 due to the sheer scale of the project.

According to the council, food scraps currently make up close to half the weight of the average Auckland household's rubbish bin. When the new collections start they are expected to reduce the amount of domestic food waste that ends up in landfills every year by 100,000 tonnes.

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Auckland Council general manager for waste Parul Sood said as part of the new service every household in urban Auckland would receive a 23-litre bin for their food waste which would be collected each week. Food scraps including fruit and vegetable peelings, leftovers, bread, pasta and rice, dairy products, meat, bones and shellfish shells, coffee grounds and tea bags would all be able to be put in the bins. The service would be paid for by a targeted rate.

Sood said processing the city's food scraps instead of sending them to landfill would also help reduce greenhouse gases.

Sood said instead of wasting food scraps, they could be put to use making heat, energy and fertiliser to grow food more sustainably.

Ecogas is a partnership between Ecostock Supplies Limited and Pioneer Energy. Ecostock Supplies currently converts 35,000 tonnes a year of commercial food waste into stock feed, and Pioneer Energy runs a landfill gas generation and industrial process heating plant converting 30,000 tonnes a year of local waste and woody biofuels.

Ecogas director Andrew Fisher said the new contract would allow it to expand its operations.

'For us it's part of what we're already doing,' Fisher said. He said the company already had a plant in Wiri where it processed commercial food waste.