Next time you walk across your local oval or through Geelong’s historic Botanic Gardens, give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done.
Garden waste from your garden bin is being transformed into high-quality compost for our region’s public parks, sporting grounds and even local farms. Spots like Myers Reserve in Bell Post Hill and the Geelong Botanic Gardens Pacific Rim Garden, which displays rare plants from areas in the pacific region threatened by deforestation and climate change.
By putting the right thing in your garden bin, you’re helping divert waste from landfill, keep valuable resources in use and drive Geelong’s circular economy. Using compost on the City’s parks also helps the ground’s water capacity and reduces the need for synthetic fertilisers.
The compost is made at the City’s Anakie Garden Organics Processing Facility, which opened in 2018 and currently turns an estimated 35,000 tonnes of material from Geelong’s garden bins into Australian standard compost every year.
Contamination like plastic bags, plant pots, treated wood and nappies have to be painstakingly removed by hand so the matured compost is free from nasty chemicals, pathogens and plastics – which is why putting the right thing in your garden bin is so important!
The Anakie facility is also set to welcome two new HotRot invessel composting units which will allow the site to process a small amount of food waste too, including from the 12-month Lara food waste collection trial.
Since starting in November, the Lara trial has collected an average of 4.5kg of food waste in orange lid bins from each participating household every week, material that would otherwise go to landfill. The initiative will help us roll out a food waste collection across Greater Geelong in 2023-2024.
Are you putting the right thing in your garden bin? With Geelong-made compost now helping keep our region green, it’s more important than ever to get it right. Do a quick check here at our handy guide.
