Expert tips on using food waste | Hawkes Bay News | Local News in Hawkes Bay

An international researcher visiting Hawke's Bay this week hopes New Zealand will get serious about managing food waste.

Food waste is a problem throughout the world, from household to nation, and it makes up 45 per cent of Hawke's Bay's refuse.

Dr Dominic Hogg established waste management consulting company Eunomia in 2001 and has worked with governments and the European Union to find the most effective ways to handle waste.

"New Zealand is lucky in some ways because it hasn't made the mistakes a lot of countries have made that are hard to come back from," he said.

Many countries improved their recycling results by collecting large amounts of green waste but most households did not produce consistent green waste.

Collecting green waste also resulted in an increase because people who would otherwise have found a different solution now just put their garden clippings into the green waste bin.

Food waste was a constant issue and would not increase with more frequent collection. Instead that waste could be more efficiently processed and used, and other refuse and recycling could be collected less often.

"Food is what becomes smelly, it is what makes people want to get rid of their rubbish," Dr Hogg said.

"If you remove that from the rubbish and have incentives for the homeowner they might choose to have their other rubbish picked up only every month."

Areas of northern Italy had similar systems in place and had managed to instil a passion in the people who lived there about doing the right thing about food waste.

"There's no reason that mentality can't be developed here," Dr Hogg said.

The next step for local councils should be looking at options for collection and processing so something productive came out of the process.

"You can get a very good quality compost," he said. "It would be up to the government to consider a system of standards to give the market confidence in the product. Sometimes people find it difficult to get past the idea of waste to see the positive attributes."

EarthCare managing director Mike Jones said it was great to be able to bring Dr Hogg's expertise to New Zealand.

"He brings the scale and experience from the investment that the UK and European Union have made and can apply it in a local context."

He hoped that councils would consider food waste as they renew waste contracts so it becomes a requirement rather than a "nice to have".

Hastings District Council waste minimisation officer Dominic Salmon said: "He has a wealth of information and ideas we can listen to and incorporate."

Hastings and Napier were working on a joint waste assessment that would be completed in the new year and reducing the amount of green waste and food waste in domestic rubbish bags was important.