Climate emergency is happening, landfills are overloaded, and the recycling industry is in crisis. Yet our collective consumption habits aren’t slowing down. In this article, we look at New Zealand's compost infrastructure and recycling volumes. In New Zealand alone, more than one million tonnes of plant matter and food scraps are sent to landfills each year, representing about 320 kilograms of organic matter for each one of us.
Industrial composting presents a huge opportunity to prevent food waste and compostable packaging from ending up in landfills where it otherwise releases methane – a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than CO2, which contributes to climate change (source).