Penrith City Council recognised by Gardening Australia

Thursday, 7 May 2020

Penrith City Council is recognised as a leader in sustainable waste management on an episode of much-loved TV programme Gardening Australia.

Penrith is the only Council in the Sydney Metropolitan area using the innovative and sustainable Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) system, which we implemented more than a decade ago. 

Gardening Australia presenter Costa Georgiadis is PCC’s Waste and Resource Recovery (WARR) Strategy Ambassador. Recently he met with our Resource Recovery Field Team to explore the benefits of FOGO; this was filmed for a segment on Gardening Australia to air on Friday 1 May at 7:30pm on ABC. 

Costa came to Penrith to see how composting can be done on a large, society-wide scale. In the FOGO system, households can put food waste, kitchen scraps, garden clippings and other organic materials into your green-lidded bin. This could be as much as 60% of a household’s waste each week. 

To capture kitchen waste, Council supplies residents with a free bench-top ‘kitchen tidy’ bin, and sends out compostable green bags to line them with four times a year. If you use all your green bags, no worries; more are available for free at Council service centres. 

“For more than a decade, Council has been diverting organic material away from landfill,” said Penrith Mayor Ross Fowler OAM.

“We are the only Council in Metropolitan Sydney using this forward-thinking system. Less organic material in landfill means less harmful C02 is released in to the atmosphere. That’s a better outcome for our residents and for future generations.”

“International Composting Awareness Week is from 4–8 May, so it’s the perfect time to remind residents about the benefits of this scheme,” continued Cllr Fowler.  

“We are well on track to reaching our goal of diverting 70% of waste from landfill by 2021”, he concluded.  

Watch Costa and Penrith City Council’s waste team on Gardening Australia on iView.

Learn more about the FOGO waste system at penrith.city/OurPlace

Information contained within this news release was correct as at Thursday, 7 May 2020.