A new coalition of Mount Alexander farmers, businesses and community groups has put $100,000 of its own money behind a home-grown plan for the shire’s food and garden waste. They are offering to fund a trial to demonstrate how the scheme could scale across the shire.
The Mount Alexander Organics Partnership is concerned that Mount Alexander Shire Council’s proposed Food Organics and Garden Organics bin rollout for 2027 could undermine locally developed community efforts.
It’s backers believe a locally designed organics system can run across the whole shire, utilising the current initiatives in that are in place.
As such, they have launched ‘Towards a home-grown, whole-of-shire organics system’. It’s a costed plan that sets out how a locally designed system could handle the shire’s food and garden waste. It invites the council to collaborate with the partnership to help test it before committing to the state government’s FOGO rollout.
\The partnership points out that the statewide FOGO requirement does not take effect until 2030, leaving time to test the local system properly before committing to a contract that could run for a decade.
Partnership spokesperson Mikaela Beckley said a blanket rollout would put the existing local system at risk.
“The community has built something special here that really works,” Beckley said.
“A one-size-fits-all FOGO service could undermine a system that’s now being talked about nationally as groundbreaking.”
Under the proposal, food scraps collected from households would be composted in the community rather than transported to an industrial processing facility. Garden waste would be chipped and mulched, and food scraps collected at scale would be composted on local farms, turning the shire’s waste into compost for local soil.
The trial would also produce a full audit of the shire’s organic waste.
Members of the partnership are proposing that they and the council trial the system across the whole shire and have it tested independently over twelve months from September.
The $100,000, donated through the Hub Foundation from members of the local community, is being offered toward the cost of the trial.
The partnership shared its plan with councillors this week and said it hopes to work with the council on shaping and co-funding the trial in the months ahead.
“People have put their own money into this. That tells you how much this town cares about this issue,” Beckley said.
“We’d like to do this with the council, not around it.”