Phase II (2025)
The objectives of this subsequent phase of the project included:
- Reviewing, assessing and consolidating a full 12 months of FOGO data for all eight EAGA councils (alongside multiple years of pre-FOGO data used to generate reliable baselines).
- Identifying opportunities for improving council data collection, quantification and reporting, including the provision of recommendations for implementation.
- Providing EAGA councils with the information and tools required to effectively communicate good news stories about FOGO waste collections to strengthen community investment and understanding of the value of diverting food waste from landfill.
Blue Environment were appointed as the consultants to lead this work, with a final report and individual emissions reduction calculators produced for council use in July 2025. Project findings demonstrated the significant emissions reduction impact of FOGO programs across EAGA councils and provided a number of insights, including the impact of bin collection frequency and universal roll-out.
Template emissions calculator tool
Phase I (2023-24)
The Community Net Zero Technical Analysis (CNZTA) commissioned by EAGA in 2022 identified that councils were generally not communicating the impact of their FOGO programs to their communities and there was an opportunity to centralise the data analysis required to support this in future.
In the second half of 2023, EAGA coordinated an initial collation of waste data across landfill and FOGO streams in all EAGA councils. This provided benchmark calculations of FOGO emissions reduction impacts, however a number of complexities and uncertainties in the data were identified. These included the challenges in removing ‘noise’ from the pre and post FOGO data to ensure that calculated averages were representative, accounting for the variations in methane capture practice at landfills sites and acknowledgement of downstream emissions of end use products (e.g. compost). The initial data review was also limited due to scheduling of FOGO implementation across different councils, with some councils not yet having a full 12 months of FOGO data available.
EAGA councils decided to enlist the expertise of specialised waste consultants to conduct a more comprehensive review of FOGO emissions reductions impacts that represents best practice methodology.