Nearly two years after food scraps collection was rolled out in New Zealand’s biggest city, a government policy change might prevent other councils from following suit. Shanti Mathias explains.
Every day, in almost every household around the country, food gets thrown out. Maybe some elderly yoghurt that is starting to turn pink with mould; maybe it’s a packet of yeast past its expiry date and no longer able to add puff to dough; maybe it’s a container of scones your teenager made yesterday, inedible due to the double dose of baking powder that was added, leaving everyone at lunchtime feeling like they’d just chewed a bar of soap. Regardless of the reason, the food has to go somewhere: a compost bin, a rubbish bin, the bokashi box on the balcony, the worm farm in the backyard, or in some New Zealand places, a council-issued food scraps bin.
Christchurch has long had an organics bin, Tauranga and New Plymouth collect food scraps and Nelson City Council provides composting vouchers to help people set up composting at home. Auckland City Council started food scraps collections nearly two years ago, with everyone in the city receiving a green bin by the end of October 2023. While hundreds of thousands of people have adopted the habit of putting out their little green bin for collection, most people don’t think about where that waste goes.
Other cities and towns, including Wellington, had plans to roll out food waste collections too, but just before Christmas, a small change appeared on the Ministry for the Environment’s website, with no accompanying announcement or press release. Four of the five big-picture waste minimisation policies supported by the ministry would no longer be mandatory, including extending kerbside organics collection to all councils and applying performance standards to composting schemes.
“It was very disappointing to see the changes, especially given the timing – many of our members were on leave and couldn’t comment on the changes,” says Nic Quilty, the chief executive of WasteMINZ, a group representing the waste industry of Aotearoa.
The changes don’t necessarily mean that councils with plans to roll out food waste collections can no longer do so; instead, they can apply for funding through the environment ministry-administered Waste Minimisation Fund. However, with lots on council agendas, the lack of requirement will likely make implementing food scraps collection less urgent, and the fund will now be stretched across multiple different priorities, not just waste reduction. “It’s quite frightening; we can’t keep digging a hole in the ground and burying our food waste,” says Kate Fenwick, a waste educator.
What happens to food scraps picked up at kerbside?
Picture your stale loaf of bread in a landfill. It is trying to rot somewhere under a thin skin of earth, surrounded by scraps of rubber and polystyrene and plastic. In this hot, covered environment, it dries out a little, rots a bit and releases methane, and slowly its nutrients dribble to the bottom of the plastic-lined pit, no longer part of the earth it once grew from. With no food scraps collection, and for those without access to a compost bin or animals to feed scraps to, sending waste to landfill is the only option.
The change in requirements for council raises some wider questions about how much food waste New Zealand produces and why preventing it is so important. According to estimates from the Ministry for the Environment, 9% of New Zealand’s methane and 4% of our overall emissions come from food and organic waste. That’s more than the amount of emissions generated by electricity production.
Beyond that, food ending up in landfill is a waste; a waste of the energy, resources and labour it took to make that food in the first place. A bite of food represents energy for the person eating it, but also the soil and sunshine that made that food, and the hands that harvested it and brought it to wherever you purchased it. If that food ends up in landfill, the energy and nutrients in it don’t go into growing more food. The dire reality of food insecurity in New Zealand makes food waste even more frustrating.
After being picked up, Auckland’s food waste goes to a sorting facility in Papakura run by Ecogas, where material that can’t be broken down (like metal or plastic) is removed. In an Auckland Council video, you can see the piles of food, dwarfing the workers in hi-vis vests who operate the diggers that consolidate the piles of food into trucks. The food arrives at the Ecogas food waste facility in Reporoa, near Rotorua; in the drone footage, it looks clean, a series of different-shaped cylinders into which mashed, now brown, food waste is poured. It takes 70 days for the food to be fully processed: inside the cylinders, it grows warm as the bacteria munch at it, turning potato skins, old rice and rejected children’s breakfasts into methane and carbon dioxide in the dark and oxygenless tank. The slushy remnants are taken to square, covered boxes, to be pasteurised and turned into fertiliser sold under the Fertify brand.
The Reporoa facility has capacity to process 75,000 tonnes of organic waste a year; with the waste from Auckland, Ecogas is now at capacity. Rotorua’s food waste will be taken to the facility from 2026 and Ecogas has plans to build another tank, to increase the capacity to 100,000 tonnes annually, according to a company spokesperson. The organisation, a partnership between Pioneer Energy and Ecostock Limited, has secured the contract to process Christchurch’s organics waste. However, the organisation is still seeking consents to actually set up the South Island facility.
Anaerobic digestion facilities like Reporoa have been described as “costly infrastructure that can only be considered good value with blinkers on” and “a last-ditch attempt to glean some value before disposal”. Compost, done locally, is often a better way to return nutrients to the soil without complex industrial processes and the use of greenhouse gases.
But for many people putting their food scraps out on the kerb to be digested a few hundred kilometres away, the alternative isn’t composting, it’s sending their food to the landfill. There are certainly downsides to Auckland’s leftover food being driven hundreds of kilometres to Reporoa. That said, the transport emissions are relatively minor; using the most efficient long-haul vehicles, food would have to be driven 1,600 kilometres to an anaerobic digestion plant before it would generate as many emissions as it would in landfill.
The impact of implementing food scraps collection in Auckland is already obvious. According to Anthony Chaney, the city’s acting general manager of waste solutions, in its first year of full operation, the scheme prevented 14,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent being released. There has also been a 11.5kg per capita reduction in general refuse being gathered, which is a 10% drop in overall waste being taken to landfill by weight.
What about preventing food waste in the first place?
Waste experts like Quilty and Fenwick refer to the waste hierarchy, the idea that before thinking about dealing with waste itself, it’s better to stop waste happening at all. Mantras like the ever popular “Rethink, reduce, reuse, recycle” are not a random list of things to do about rubbish, but a series of steps. First: do you need this? Second: can you use less of it? Third: can you use it again? Fourth: can you turn it into something else? Then come the gnarlier, smellier problems, like recovering materials out of waste and dealing with the leftovers, like landfilling.
“We’re all about maximising resource use by putting materials where they should be; we would rather work at the top of the waste hierarchy, than have food end up in the compost bin,” Quilty says.
Reducing food waste requires individual action. It’s estimated that 122,547 tonnes of food waste are generated by households in New Zealand each year. Love Food Hate Waste, an international organisation whose New Zealand branch is funded by WasteMINZ in partnership with councils, has any number of ideas on its website to help households. Not buying in bulk, having a dedicated shelf of your fridge that needs using first, recipes for leftover barbecue meat or using cauliflower stems, putting carrots in an airtight container so they don’t shrivel in the fridge. Fenwick uses many of these strategies in her everyday life. “I was terrible with buying lettuce, I used to always think ‘I’ll be healthy this week,’ but then I realised that in cold weather I never feel like a salad,” she says. She’s worried that the government policy change will lead to a shift away from funding public education with a focus on practical, easy-to-implement advice.
But lots of the waste occurs before food reaches your pantry. A 2020 study estimated that unsold or uneaten food at the retail level (supermarkets, dairies etc) in New Zealand was equivalent to 13kg per capita per year – equivalent to 60,5000 tonnes of food. 2018 research from WasteMINZ estimated that cafes and restaurants generated 24,000 tonnes of food waste each year; vegetables, meat, bakery items and fruit were the main categories. Lots of this food waste is preventable, as a series of in-depth reports from the prime minister’s chief science adviser outlined from 2022-2024; from action on farms and orchards, in processing, at retail stores and within households, the final report lays out an ambitious plan for New Zealand to meet the UN Sustainable Development goal of reducing food waste by 50% by 2030.
One piece of the puzzle will certainly be food rescue organisations, which do some of the work to divert waste from big-scale sources (like supermarkets or restaurants) and connect that food with people who need it.
Food waste touches multiple dimensions of our lives
Reducing food waste is not a straightforward problem, and every proposed solution has trade-offs. Collecting food scraps to send to an anaerobic digestion facility could discourage people from making their own compost, because it’s less effort, but it’s better than food ending up in landfill. Initiatives like Wonky Box divert food that producers aren’t able to sell to supermarkets, but might mean that households end up with turnips or kamokamo squash that they’re not confident to use (although the company tries to offset this by providing lots of recipe resources).
There’s a moral dimension to food, too, like the invocation to eat healthy. Fresh produce – one of the most energy and labour intensive kinds of foods, not to mention often disproportionately expensive compared to other staples with longer shelf lives – is a frequent victim of this thinking. “You might buy broccoli because you think you should be eating broccoli, but all you do is bring it home and replace the wilted broccoli you bought last week and put the new one in the fridge,” Fenwick says. She doesn’t want people to feel judged, because she’s been in the same position. “I couldn’t be more educated about food waste and I still sometimes end up throwing food away.”
A disgust response, like the retch that rose in my throat when I watched the video of Auckland’s sloppy food scraps being taken to the anaerobic digester, is normal. Wariness towards off food is an instinct that seems to have evolved to stop us from getting sick. And while passing a best before date isn’t necessarily an indication that food is inedible – there’s no need to pour milk down the drain if it still smells fine – the dates are part of a system that keeps supermarket shelves constantly full. This leads to waste, but is also what consumers expect. “Supermarkets have put a huge amount of effort into food rescue,” Fenwick says. “But as a consumer you want them to be always full, for it to look like supermarkets never run out.”
There are other limiting factors, too. It’s harder to prepare produce if you can’t afford a functioning fridge; it’s difficult to compost when you don’t have any outdoor space in your apartment; it’s easier to buy more than you need when the deals are good if you can’t afford an item at full price. If you live further from a supermarket, or have less time to shop, then you might do less frequent, bigger shops, which could lead to having too much food, and therefore waste.
And as well as providing nutrition, food has a place in culture, part of how we understand ourselves and each other. Hosting a big feast for an Indian wedding, getting to feed your cousin his first few bites of fish, trying some ful mudammes made by an international student you made friends with at the farmers market: these events are special because food is valued. It feels different to throw out inedible food than it does to scrunch a plastic wrapper into a rubbish bin, because of the resources and nutrition that food represents.
That’s why, despite all the drawbacks and imperfections of kerbside food waste collection, waste experts still think it’s worth doing. Chaney says that one of the main motivations to have a benchtop scraps bin as well as an outdoor one in Auckland was international research showing that an indoor bin raised awareness about wasted food and led to behaviour change. When you use a food scraps bin “you actually see it, you get a visual reminder of what food you’re wasting,” Fenwick says. “You can’t pretend it’s a magical solution where it goes into landfill and disappears.”