FOGO stands for Food Organics Garden Organics.

Residents will be able to place their food waste into their existing lime-green lidded bin, which will become their FOGO bin. The FOGO bin will reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill or energy recovery.

The contents of the FOGO bin will be turned into high-quality compost. This will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and have a positive impact on our environment.

Initially, the FOGO service will only be available to properties without shared bins.

Best practice guidelines for introducing FOGO suggest a multi-stage process, whereby FOGO is implemented in single unit dwellings first (eg. houses) so that lessons learnt can be applied to multi-unit dwellings (eg. apartments).

As the name suggests, all food and garden organics can go in the lime green-lidded FOGO bin.

All food organics including:

• Vegetable and fruit scraps
• Meat and bones
• Seafood
• Eggshells
• Teabags and coffee grinds
• Dairy products
• Take away food (no containers or packaging)
• Any food that has expired or is mouldy (no containers or packaging)

Garden waste: 

• Grass clippings
• Pruning, cuttings, trimmings
• Twigs and sticks
• Palm fronds
• Weeds

As well as certified compostable caddy liners and produce bags – look for this symbol to make sure they can go in your FOGO bin:

It is important that you continue to only put garden organics in your lime green-lidded GO bin until FOGO is rolled out.

GO stands for Garden Organics, while FOGO stands for Food Organics Garden Organics.

GO bins are only used for lawn clippings and garden vegetation. These materials are currently mulched and available to residents for free from the West Metro Recycling Centre.

FOGO bins can accept food scraps, as well as garden organics. These materials combined will be taken to a FOGO processing location to be composted into Australian Certified compost.

No, please don’t put food scraps in your green-lidded bin until FOGO is introduced in your council area.

Currently, your green-lidded bin is for garden organics (GO) only. Adding food scraps to greenwaste destined for mulch causes contamination and reduces what can be mulched. Please only put garden vegetation and lawn clippings in your Garden Organics (GO) bin for now. Learn more about keeping your GO bin clean and green.

Moving to a three-bin FOGO system has many benefits for our environment, including:

Reduction in landfill: Transitioning to FOGO removes all food waste from the red-lidded general waste bin and keeps it out of landfill. The WA State Government has set a target for 70% of waste to be diverted from landfill by 2025 and FOGO will help us all to meet this target.

Using organic waste: Organic waste is a problem in landfill as it produces methane, a harmful greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Turning organic waste into compost will reduce the impact on the environment and return valuable nutrients to the soil.

• Collecting both food organics as well as garden organics means that our processors can make compost for growing more food.  When trapped in landfill, FOGO produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that harms the atmosphere and environment.
• Landfilling FOGO is a waste of a valuable source of nutrients for our soils.
• Composting FOGO is better for the environment because it reduces methane production and recovers and returns valuable nutrients to the soil in the form of compost.