Lockyer Valley household FOGO diversion

Lockyer Valley household FOGO diversion is a source-separated organic waste project located near Gatton in the Lockyer Valley, approximately 90km west of Brisbane in Queensland. It was registered in October 2023 by the Lockyer Valley Regional Council. As a waste diversion initiative, the project does not have a defined spatial land area.

Source Separated Organic Waste (SSOW) projects involve separating eligible organic waste, such as food and garden organics (FOGO), at the point of generation and diverting it from landfills. This prevents the waste from decomposing anaerobically and generating methane. The diverted waste is instead sent to eligible treatment facilities for processing, which in this project's case includes open windrow and enclosed composting, as well as the transfer of biogas to a combustion device for destruction.

The Lockyer Valley region is widely known as the "salad bowl" of Australia, with regional land use heavily dominated by intensive agriculture, cropping, and horticulture. The environment features a sub-tropical climate with moderate, summer-dominant rainfall. The region is supported by highly fertile alluvial soils and dark cracking clays (vertosols).

This project began as a kerbside FOGO bin trial funded by the Queensland Government, rolled out to approximately 1,000 households across Gatton and Laidley. The council processed the material into soil-conditioning compost at a purpose-built pilot facility within the Gatton Landfill Resource Recovery Centre. Interestingly, the council formally ceased the trial in July 2025 due to higher-than-expected contamination rates (which increased processing costs) and community concerns over the transition to fortnightly general waste collections. Additionally, the project's agent, Dimitrios Dimoliatis, acts as a participant across multiple other major corporate and council waste diversion projects nationwide. Registry records for this project also contain anomalous database notes regarding a 2018 contract and a proponent change involving "Menangina Pty Ltd", this appears to be a database compilation error concatenating historical notes from an unrelated vegetation project.