The colder winds of Autumn have finally arrived, and we are starting a new family tradition…Olive Harvesting.

When we first moved into our forever house, one of the first tasks on our renovation list was planting five olive trees. We purchased our trees from an olive farmer in the Hunter Valley, whose passion for his lifelong chosen craft was inspiring. Three generations of our family wandered through his orchard listening to the stories from over 50 years of propagation and planting experiments.

Fast forward five years, and most of our olive trees have an abundance of olives this year – our first harvest!

Olives have a special place in our family history. It’s funny how food can capture memories. When our daughter was a toddler, and I still worked in the city on Fridays, she would sit on the balcony in a highchair next to her Dad as they shared a cheese platter with olives while they waited for me to get home. About a year later, I happened to join them for their Friday afternoon session and jumped in alarm as our daughter put an olive with pip in her mouth. They both looked at me in disbelief. Little did I know she was an olive expert who had been eating them all year under Dad’s rules.

So, it turns out ‘making’ olives is a drawn-out process, which makes me appreciate them even more. We have harvested about half of our olives, deciding to keep the remaining ones on the tree to ripen further. After some reading, we have chosen to brine our olives, so we have our first batch weighed down in water and salt to cure. Whilst we are regularly inspecting and changing the water, I know the first indication that they are ready will be the olive level dropping as my daughter will not be able to resist sampling them as they sure! 🙂 If anyone has any tips, I would love to hear them. Fingers crossed we end up with amazing olives to share rather than extra ingredients for our compost bin.

I’m not confident my olive experiment will evolve into mass production, so it’s fortunate a lot is happening both within our team and across the FOGO and composting industries.

Supported by the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), Australian Local Councils continue to implement FOGO with new composting facilities being opened to process food waste. If your local council is not yet offering this service, it’s likely it will be coming over the next few years.

NSW has also increased their focus on COFO (Commercial Food Organics) and have mandated that larger food waste generators such as supermarkets, producers, and shopping centres must have a dedicated food waste collection system by July. The mandate will increase to include more businesses over the next few years, and it is also expected that other states may follow to suit.

Residential FOGO Programs have been really successful in gaining community engagement and increasing participation. We are excited this momentum will expand to commercial waste.

The driver is clear. Food waste in Landfill is a massive greenhouse gas generator in Australia, contributing most of the 11 million tonnes of greenhouse gasses released from Landfill each year. That is equivalent to the annual emissions of about 3 million cars. To deliver the next step change it’s essential that commercial organisations also paly their role in reducing Landfill rates.

If you are looking to get your work team or local school involved in better recycling or food waste collection, we would recommend reviewing the range of recycling bins at Source Separation Systems, many of which are made in Australia from Post-Consumer Recycled Content (the recyclables in our yellow bins).

We are really proud to be supporting many communities and businesses as they make the transition to FOGO or COFO.

Enjoy Autumn.

Mel