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We've partnered with innovative waste management company GoTerra to roll out the BioPak Compost Service to Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. Through the service, Canberra businesses will be able to send BioPak compostable foodservice packaging, along with food scraps, to be composted rather than ending up in landfill.

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).

Article first seen on BeanScene Magazine on July 1, 2019.

BioPak’s vision is a world without waste. Through its compost service, BioPak hopes to offer a circular economy solution that treats foodservice packaging and food scraps as resources, not waste.

BioPak Founder Richard Fine on the solution to the recycling crisis. Could a natural system of material recycling that returns valuable nutrients into the system be the answer? With a growing number of businesses choosing to use compostable packaging and more commercial composters keen to accept these products along with food waste, businesses are able to go plastic-free and reduce their waste to landfill.

The South Australian Government is considering banning single-use plastic products such as coffee cups with plastic lining, straws, and cutlery. According to an Australian Senate inquiry, single-use plastics could be banned by 2023.

While the percentage of waste going to landfill has decreased, waste tonnage overall is growing with the economy and population. Recycling doesn’t change the amount of waste created. Instead, it minimises resources lost by diverting material from landfill and transforming it into a new material. Sounds good in theory, but two basic questions about recycling persist: is it really good for the environment and does it make economic sense?

Merlo Coffee today launching a compostable cup crusade to stop more than three million cups going to landfill each year.

Australians have a love affair with coffee, each year using an estimated 1 billion disposable coffee cups. That's approximately 2,700,000 paper cups tossed out every day. So it’s no surprise that new cup recycling schemes are popping up. But do they actually work?