Food Free February

If you’ve been following along on our social media (if you don’t follow us, you totally should), we’ve been sharing all sorts of interesting tips, facts and ideas about how to make the most of the amazing resource that is food!

Did you know that we process about 250kg of food waste a day at The Norfolk Wave? That equates to just over 13% of our daily processing. Every kilo of food that comes into the centre is checked for plastic or non-organic materials before it is weighed and passed onto the NIRC team for feeding into the HotRot composters. Inside the composters the food is incorporated with other green waste and is turned into an early-stage compost over 28 days. After some extra maturing, this compost is a great addition to the garden or around fruit trees and native plants.

Keeping food contamination out of your other rubbish is the no.1 most important thing you can do to help us recycle your rubbish! ‘Food contamination’ doesn’t just mean food scraps in the bin. Food contamination also looks like: unrinsed tins, bloody meat bags and leftover yoghurt in the yoghurt container. When rubbish comes to The Centre unrinsed, we have to use time and precious water to clean these things before we can recycle them. The easiest and most water efficient way to get this rubbish rinsed is to use your old washing up water when you’ve finished doing the dishes. Because you wash the dishes anyway, right? If everyone takes responsibility for their own rubbish and practices water-saving methods to do so, we’ll all be headed in the right direction.

If you don’t rinse it, and we can’t rinse it, then that rubbish, food and all, gets exported to landfill in Queensland. No good for our environment, no good for our economy.

So please, if you’re not in the habit of keeping your scraps separate, or you don’t have a good system in place to rinse your rubbish, get cracking! Our team are always on hand to help out where we can.

Follow us on Fb @ The Norfolk Wave, or Instagram @norfolkwave for weekly updates, insights and news from The Recycling Centre!

Thaenks f aklan