City of Tea Tree Gully residents deserve an A-plus for their efforts in reducing waste over the past decade.

Together, we've cut the amount of waste we generate and are recycling more than ever. But our biggest opportunity is still on the kitchen bench.

A recent kerbside bin audit shows our community is moving in the right direction. Today, around 53% of household waste is diverted from landfill, outperforming the Adelaide metropolitan average.  At the same time, the amount of waste generated by each household has fallen by around 6 kilograms per week over the past decade.

These results are worth celebrating and demonstrate that thousands of households are making better choices every day.

Despite these improvements, food waste is the single biggest recoverable material being placed in the red-lid landfill bin. Each year, more than 8,000 tonnes of food waste is ending up in landfill. Now that’s a monster problem.

Surprisingly, only 7% of the food waste generated by our community is correctly disposed of in the green-lid food and organics bin. That means there is enormous potential for improvement by changing one everyday habit.

The solution, feed food waste to your green-lid food and organics bin, not the red-lid landfill bin.

If every household made this one simple change, our community could avoid around $1.4 million each year in landfill disposal costs. That’s money that could be invested in our parks, playgrounds, roads and community services.

To help residents make this change, free Mini Muncher kitchen caddies and compostable liners are available to make it easier to collect food scraps at home.

Every food scrap placed in the green-lid food and organics bin gives food waste a second life as contents are processed into compost for use by home gardeners and farmers – a win for the environment and our community.