Under the new Food+Garden=Green service, all food scraps and garden waste will go into the household green bin, which will be emptied weekly.

Garbage (red lid) bins and recycling (yellow lid) bins will be emptied on alternating fortnights.

The contents of the green bins will be delivered to the new Lake Macquarie Organics Resource Recovery Facility, at Awaba tip, where it will be transformed into high-quality compost products for reuse on parks, grounds and sporting fields.

The state-of-the-art facility, built by Remondis at a cost of more than $10 million, is expected to reduce the amount of waste going into landfill by as much as one third.

Lake Macquarie City Council’s sustainability manager, Dr Alice Howe, said the July 30 launch would be the first major change to kerbside collections since the introduction of the green bin in 2013. 

“About a third of the material in our garage bin is food waste,” she said. 

“That’s a valuable resource that can be turned into high-quality compost and it’s much cheaper to process it as compost than it is to landfill it.

“So it has environmental and economic benefits to our community.”

Dr Howe said 16 councils in NSW took food waste through green bins, but Lake Macquarie would be the first in the Hunter as part of a three-bin service.  

Council always planned to include food in the green bin and trials held in Fishing Point and Rathmines have left it confident residents will embrace the change. 

“The only thing that can’t go in is hard shellfish shells; so muscles, clams, pipis,” she said. “Everything else can go in, [even] dog waste can go in, but not cat waste. 

“Pretty much everything else that anyone would eat apart from those hard shells.”

Compostable bags, such as the ones provided, are the only type of bag that can be placed into the green bin. Normal plastics and biodegradables cannot be used.

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