this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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The council I live in introduced them a couple of years ago.
There was quite a lot of complaining on social media. In conjunction with a weekly FOGO they changed the weekly general waste bin to one half the size and only collected it every 2 weeks. As a result lot of households struggled to get rid of all their rubbish.
Anecdotally: It's seemingly settling down now but a first there was a lot more litter in the streets from overflowing bins, both people's waste bins and bins in parks. A number of degenerates took to burning their plastic waste in combustion heaters / backyard pits. Which is highly inappropriate given we are less than 10km from the CBD and most blocks are sub 500 sqm . some are still doing this in winter. I wish there would be massive fines for this.
The council has been giving notices to people who put plastic etc in their FOGO bin. Unsure if they have cameras in the truck or if it's random inspections. Apparently they will stop collections for repeat offenders.
The council will supply larger and multiple waste bins for households who are willing to pay extra. I think they might have got less backlash if it had been opt in at first for a discount rather than this method.
Personally I think FOGO are pretty good if you have a suburban garden. Means you can do a little bit of pruning here and there and put the cuttings in the FOGO. Previously you would need to collect it all up then order a big green waste skip.
Oh damn, half the size and half the frequency really seems like overkill. What do they possibly save by also doing half the size, considering homes presumably already have the older, larger bins?
Anyway, the green bins this is talking about would still be good for suburban gardens. But that's all they're for. Grass cuttings and tree clippings and the like. But FOGO is that plus food waste. Leftovers that didn't get eaten. The butts and peelings of vegetables. Bones and fatty off-cuts of meat. Etc. Nearly every household can use a lot of that stuff.
The council removed the everyone's old larger general waste wheely bins when they rolled the new system out. Old system was 1 large general waste collected weekly. 1 large recycle bin collected fortnightly.
Now we have 1 half size waste bin collected fortnightly. Same recycle bin collected fortnightly. Large FOGO bin collected weekly. Unless I've done gardening there is usually only a tiny volume of food scraps in mine.
Part of the intent is to encourage everyone to produce less waste by making it harder to get rid of. The other is of course to get the methane generating FOGO separated so it does not end up in landfill.
Oh and the council saves money on disposal by having this system in place. Savings were not directly passed on to rate payer's though. I guess they are indirectly via not raising annual rates by as much.
This is what I just don't understand. If everyone already had 1 large redtop bin, why not just keep the large redtops and reduce the frequency of collection to fortnightly? It seems like a big extra cost for the council to replace all those perfectly good bins with new smaller ones.
I guess that makes sense. Maybe eventually it could even be a good goal achieved in that way. I still think it would've been smarter to keep the same bin size while reducing frequency...at least at first.
How, exactly? If they'd kept the same bin size it would have saved a heap, but adding in the cost of buying all the new bins doesn't sound like a smart decision financially.