Food

The NSW EPA has released its first round of Food Donation Education grants under the $337 million NSW Government Waste Less Recycle More initiative (WLRM). The new grants are open to councils, NGOs, community groups and NFPs. They offer funding to deliver projects that increase the efficiency and capacity of food relief organisations to collect and redistribute high-quality surplus food, to reduce the amount of organic material going to landfill.

Australia has a significant and growing challenge in how it manages its waste. Tonnages continue to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 6.2%, six times faster than population growth, and 2.5 times faster than GDP growth. Landfill costs are increasing due to landfill levies and landfill scarcity.

By Virginia Brunton, MRA Consulting Group MRA Consulting Group (MRA) together with a working group of food safety professionals and Freshcare, revised the Food Safety and Quality (FSQ) assurance code of practice (COP) and established criteria that allowed compost, produced under the Australian standard for composts (AS4454) to be used by farmers with Freshcare certification. […]

By Virginia Brunton – Principal Consultant (Organics), MRA Consulting Group Freshcare is the fresh produce industry’s own on-farm assurance program adopted by thousands of fresh produce businesses as their key food safety program. In addition to the Food Safety and Quality (FSQ) assurance code of practice (COP) to ensure safe fruit and vegetables, Freshcare also […]

The councils of the Albury Wodonga region have set the “best practice” benchmark for food and garden waste (FOGO) recycling in Australia. Recent data comparing the Albury Wodonga food and green waste contamination rate to other councils that have introduced similar services, shows that the region is performing better than all others, with a current […]