Tonnes of food scraps collected from restaurants and supermarkets are being converted into electricity under a green energy initiative powering thousands of homes in Perth.
The City of Cockburn has made the waste to energy service a permanent fixture of its general duties, collecting rotting food waste from local businesses and feeding it to a mechanical ‘stomach’ at a nearby fertiliser plant.
The anaerobic digester heats the food, traps its methane gas and feeds the energy into the electricity grid, powering up to 3,000 homes.
“Food waste really shouldn’t be thought of as a waste, it should be thought of as a resource,” said the city’s waste education officer, Clare Courtauld.
“It’s really important to take food waste out of landfill because it produces harmful greenhouse gases.
“If global food waste was a country, it would actually be the third-highest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.”