Food organics pilot and fortnightly bin collection kicks off in Belconnen

Where it was already being dumped anyway?

At the landfill section of the MLRMC which means it was buried.

Now it is being churned above ground with green waste to make compost.

“It is really important not to contaminate the FOGO bins and that’s because the products that we’re making from the food and garden waste is going to be a landscaping product. It’s going to be compost and we will hopefully be able to use it on landscapes around Canberra,” said Ms Anderson.

I live in Tuggers and haven’t noticed – not sure how you could, when its only a handful of suburbs worth in a pilot program. Its worth noting that methane is the stuff that genuinely stinks, rotten egg style. You’ll note per the article that composting largely eliminates methane emissions from decomposing organic matter. My compost at home has that damp, earthy smell you get after rain,.

Methane is odourless…

From a study at Washington State University:
Successful development of organics recycling has had challenges, particularly when
food scraps are diverted to composting facilities designed primarily to process green waste. U.S. cities including Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Waukegan (IL) have grappled with odor and air emission concerns due to increased flows of highly putrescible food scraps to composting facilities (Le, 2013; Driessen, 2013; Allen, 2013; Howard, 2013; Moran, 2013).
Because of the time lag between residential disposal, collection and transport, food scraps have often begun rotting prior to arrival at the compost facility. When rotting food scraps are combined with increasing fresh green waste flows in late spring through early summer the potential for odour generation dramatically increases.
In addition to these obvious odour problems, recent studies from Swedish researchers (Sundberg et al., 2004), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA, 2008), and the U.S. Compost Council (Christiansen, 2009) demonstrate that inclusion of partially decomposed food scraps can lead to acidification and inhibition of standard composting, resulting in poor compost process control and inferior product stabilization. Operation under such conditions leads to the increased release of volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), methane, and ammonia – all potential sources of potent odours and other emissions harmful to the environment and human health. These studies further indicate that standard compost management strategies (increasing temperature and airflow) designed to reduce odor problems under normal composting conditions may, in fact, aggravate the odor problems.

But the ACT Government knows best, don’t they.

Perhaps the ACT govt. is looking at references more recent than a decade old. Keeping things aerobic is the whole point of this exercise to avoid methane emissions. Aerobic conditions should reduce other problems. If the material is being dumped in any case, it won’t make it worse.

Perhaps they are but if that’s the case, why don’t they (or you) tell us the details. The ideal situation is for large scale composting to be done in an enclosed shed and that isn’t the case at MLRMC.

The point is the stuff previously going to land fill (food scraps and meat) is already rotting when it gets mixed with the green waste and a different odour is being emitted from day one of the composting process.

Have you noticed it in the past few days?