What happens to our food waste?!

[Foodfrezy]

Our local council used to send out food waste bags that they asked us to use to dispose of food waste. I was (rightly or wrongly) under the impression that these bags were biodegradable and would be effectively composted with the food waste.

I assumed that once food waste was collected each week it was deposited somewhere to be composted or similar.

They now no longer provide food bags and have said we can use any plastic bags to deposit our food waste in the food bin. These are not biodegradable, so what happens with the food waste? Do they manual sort it somewhere after collection?

If it’s just going to go in general waste and not be recycled in some way I am not sure what the point of them collecting it is any longer.

Email the council and ask.

Ours expects the caddy bags to be biodegradable, and they collect it all every week. It then goes off to some facility where they use it to make biofuel and compost or something like that. The council actually makes money out of it.

Ours have to biodegradable as they make it into compost. They then have piles of it in each recycling centre every summer so we can help ourselves to free compost. Some people obviously use any old bag because there are occasionally shreds of plastic bag in it.

Have you double checked someone didn’t initially make an error in the announcement of this info?

We used to use plastic bags and then the council swapped to green biodegradable bags. Our council has now stopped providing the bags and we need to buy our own. Best ones so far have been from aldi.

It's possible that they're just collecting it separately more regularly than the rest of the black bins in order to reduce smells/maggots and they'll incinerate it.

It’s burnt and made into some kind of energy apparently.

Years ago we were told not to use biodegradable bags. They supplied us with green plastic bags. Now we are told we can use any bags. Any old plastic bag will do or we can buy ones.

Sounds like atleast a few LAs use plastic bags too!

There are companies like Keenan Recycling (the biggest in the UK) that collect food waste and convert them into electricity!

Our council provide plastic bags for our food waste. It goes to some kind of biomass generator, apparently...