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There is a rising stink around rubbish removal in Australia. Councils around the country are looking for ways to divert more organic waste away from landfill.

Australians generate about 14.6m tonnes of organic waste each year – mostly garden clippings, food scraps and timber. About half of it is collected from households in kerbside bins.

Keeping organics out of the general waste matters, partly because it produces methane – a potent greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon dioxide – when left to rot in landfill.

Organic material is also a valuable, nutrient-rich resource. Already, about 62% of it is diverted from the waste stream and turned into mulch or compost.

Most households across the country can dispose of their organics in either a green or Fogo (food organics and garden organics) bin. But some communities, such as in Castlemaine in central Victoria, have gone further by creating their own local solutions.

Why green waste disposal has become a global problem

The problem of green waste in landfill isn’t unique to Australia. Growing awareness of the methane emissions has led to a global rethink of how to manage rubbish tips.

Dr Robert Crocker, a senior lecturer at Adelaide University’s School of Architecture and Built Environment, says: “The old model of the dump, where almost everything was organic, has died.”

In Australia, kerbside operations vary from state to state. The Victorian government has introduced mandatory changes, requiring every household to divide their waste into four streams – general rubbish, mixed recycling, glass bottles and jars, and Fogo – from 1 July 2027.

“Fogo is valuable, and that is why the waste managers want it,” Crocker says.

“Unlike landfill, which is very expensive to look after responsibly, Fogo can make them a bit of money, and can then be sold on as compost, back to the community.”

But there are also household and community-based ways of dealing with green waste, including using worm farms and composting.

“If the community has the equipment, they could help community gardens and other gardeners. After all, our big problem in Australia is water retention and nutrient retention in our soils,” Crocker says.

Locals take compost management into their own hands

People in Castlemaine care so deeply about composting, they formed a Yimby (yes, in my back yard) group in 2020, creating a network of dedicated volunteers to make sure organic material was separated, collected and properly composted.

Lucy Young from Yimby Castlemaine says an average day for a volunteer involves walking around their allocated neighbourhood and swapping household compost buckets for clean, lined buckets.

The material is taken to the volunteer’s home, weighed and entered into a database. The group has more than 50 composters collecting from more than 650 households. The group estimates it has now collected about 50,000 buckets.

But when the Mount Alexander shire council announced in 2025 it would introduce a Fogo kerbside bin to separate organic from general waste, Yimby immediately saw a potential problem.

It asked the council to carefully assess the value of adding a Fogo rollout, presenting a petition with over 1,000 signatures calling for a “Go slow on Fogo” so the council could gather data and hear community concerns.

“We are confident that this community can design a bespoke organics recycling system to care for the organics in this shire and put them back into the soil,” says Young.

Yimby’s vision is based on the neighbourhood system already in place, but with more support for home composters and on-farm composting, and a behaviour change program designed to lift uptake.

The council says it is still considering a Fogo service in line with state government requirements and plans to respond to Yimby’s petition at its next meeting.

A national challenge with local solutions

Many Australian households have adopted composting, worm farms or bokashi systems as a way of turning their organic waste into valuable nutrient-rich soil in their gardens. Crocker says councils should be actively encouraging more community involvement in waste management.

“The community needs to be engaged and educated … that is probably what our friends in Castlemaine are attempting to do,” he says.

Australia should be looking at waste systems elsewhere. Crocker gives the example of Sweden, where there are community hubs for separating and dropping off and separating different types of waste, including e-waste, batteries and other materials.

In the Japanese town of Kamikatsu the residents take their waste to the local recycling centre, or “Gomi station”, and sort it themselves into more than 40 different categories.

Around Australia, there are other examples of community initiatives tackling organic waste, like the City of Melbourne’s composting hubs. Or Peel, a digital platform where people can share their compost bins with their neighbours.

“The idea is [to be] part of the circular economy, which is to keep products in use for as long as possible, and in this reduce waste and give our environment time to recover,” Crocker says.

In Castlemaine, Young says the Yimby model may not work in every local government area, but it shows that a highly engaged and motivated community can do things differently.

“Perhaps Fogo makes sense in highly urbanised settings where the density of housing excludes access to land, and perhaps there are no communal spaces,” she says

“[But] if decision-making at a local level could be more collaborative, then perhaps communities could decide how best to recycle their organics.”