Gardening Australia’s Costa Georgiadis is a passionate ambassador for the Food Organics Garden Organics (FOGO) project, which is ready to roll out through the Bega Valley Shire on October 29.
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The well-known television presenter and landscape architect will be one of the many faces of the FOGO project.
Educational advertisements featuring Mr Georgiadis and 50 local school children are scheduled to hit our television screens early October.
Mr Georgiadis and Bega Valley’s FOGO project leader Joley Vidau are determined to help spread the message of how important the initiative is for the benefit of the whole community.
Ms Vidau said there is an average of 11.3kg of organic waste in one household’s red bin each week. Big changes are ahead with residents’ new green food organics bin to be collected weekly and red landfill waste bins to be picked up fortnightly.
Ms Vidau and Mr Georgiadis visited the shire’s Central Waste Facility at Wolumla where cameras were set for a video shoot on Friday, September 14.
Before meeting with the video producers, Mr Georgiadis and Ms Vidau stood before the new $1.5million landfill waste cell – “a huge hole in the ground”.
“One of these cells was planned to fill in four years, but at the current rate it will be full in less than three,” Ms Vidau said.
It costs $6million each year to run the landfill waste service and facility – the introduction of FOGO is predicted to be beneficial financially and environmentally.
“It will not only save us money but we are also doing the right thing for the environment,” Ms Vidau said.
Mr Georgiadis agreed and said “we should get angry about it because it is our community money that we are just throwing in to a hole”.
“Although this (landfill waste) is a solution for now, we can still solve it at the source,” he said.
Mr Georgiadis explained other ways the community can help to reduce landfill waste. He encouraged everyone to ask themselves questions when buying new products.
“I ask myself the question – am I buying this to divert it from landfill for a short period of time or does it really have a value?
“When I bring something new in to my life, I think – is it here just to support the moment? Is it going to temporarily be in my orbit until it finishes in landfill therefore do I actually need it?
“That just translates across everything – your fashions to the materials that you use to the technology and everything in your day to day,” he said.
For more information on the introduction of FOGO, visit Council’s website.