Sick of wrapping up soggy food scraps and dealing with stinky, messy compost bins?

Well Lismore City Council has a solution for people who love a clean compost bin and want to be green.

After a year of trialling different biodegradable bags, Lismore City Council is introducing the BioBag – a fully biodegradable bag than you can put in your compost bin and when it’s full, simply tie it up and chuck it in your green organics bin for collection.

“It is amazing how many people still put their organic waste in a plastic bag before putting it in their organics wheelie bin,” Council’s waste education officer Kevin Trustum said. “Plastic bags contaminate the organics, making the composted products useless and in so doing, causes it to be sent to landfill.”

International Composting Week is coming up in May and according to Eric Love, Centre for Organic & Resource Enterprises chairman, getting organics out of landfill will massively reduce Ausralia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“Hundreds of millions of tonnes of active organic materials are locked up in landfill. When buried in a landfill and deprived of air, its decomposition produces methane which escapes into the atmosphere. Methane is a gas with 25 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide,” he said.

Armed with this knowledge and a BioBag from Council, there’s really no reason for organics to be going anywhere but in the green-lidded bins and away from landfill.

The first 1000 households who register can get a free kitchen caddy and a 12-month supply of BioBags. More will be rolled out in the future, but they are currently not for sale, and the initial 1000 will be given on a ‘first in first served’ basis.

People should register at Lismore City Council’s Corporate Centre in Goonellabah or the CBD Office in Magellan St for a BioBag pack.