Blue Mountains Food Waste Recovery

Blue Mountains Food Waste Recovery is a waste diversion project located in the Blue Mountains local government area, approximately 50 to 100km west of Sydney in New South Wales. It was registered in March 2026 and operates across the municipality, meaning it does not have a traditional agricultural project area boundary.

Source Separated Organic Waste projects involve diverting eligible organic materials away from landfills to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Under this methodology, the standard requirements mandate that eligible waste, such as food and garden organics, must be separated at the point of generation and transferred to an eligible facility. Approved treatment technologies include open windrow composting, enclosed composting, anaerobic digestion with biogas destruction, or the manufacture of process engineered fuel.

The Blue Mountains region is heavily forested and globally known for its World Heritage-listed national parks, residential townships, and tourism, rather than typical broadacre land uses like cropping or grazing. The regional environment is characterized by moderate to high rainfall, and its native soils are predominantly sandy loams derived from Hawkesbury sandstone, mixed with localized clay and shale profiles.

This project is deeply integrated into the Blue Mountains City Council's "Towards Zero Waste" strategy and its overarching commitment to achieving net zero emissions. To support the project, the Council is rolling out a new Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) waste service, providing local households with kitchen benchtop caddies and compostable liners to easily separate food scraps during meal preparation. By keeping this organic matter out of the local Blaxland landfill, the project avoids the generation of methane, a greenhouse gas 27 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and instead transforms the municipal waste into high-quality compost to enrich soils for gardens and crops.