Last updated: May 2026 · Maintained by the Bin Night Tonight team
An explainer of the two newer kerbside services rolling out across Australian councils, and what they mean for your household.
FOGO stands for Food Organics and Garden Organics. It's a kerbside collection service where food scraps go in the same bin as your garden waste, in a lime-green-lidded bin, and the combined material is composted into soil for farms, parks and landscaping.
A FOGO bin accepts almost anything biological: fruit and vegetable scraps, meat and bones, dairy, bread, pasta, cooked food, coffee grounds, tea bags, eggshells, garden prunings, grass clippings, leaves, even soiled paper towels in some councils. The food scraps usually go into a small kitchen caddy lined with a council-approved compostable bag, which then empties into the kerbside bin.
FOGO is one of the most impactful waste-reduction programmes available, because food waste is roughly one-third of what most Australian households throw in general waste. Pulling it out of landfill cuts methane emissions and creates a useful product on the other end.
FOGO is becoming standard across Victorian metropolitan councils, with councils like Darebin, Maroondah, Monash, Hume and Casey running comprehensive programmes. Regional councils are following, often in partnership with shared composting facilities.
Some councils run a garden-only green-bin service rather than full FOGO. The difference matters: if your green bin says "garden organics only" on the lid sticker, don't put food in it. Food in a garden-only bin contaminates the load and can attract pests at the processing facility. Use Bin Night Tonight to check what your specific address has.
After a fortnight or two it becomes second nature. Most households find their general-waste bin gets significantly lighter, sometimes to the point that a smaller red bin becomes enough.
A growing number of councils now collect glass in a dedicated purple-lidded bin, separate from the yellow mixed-recycling bin. The reason is mostly about quality. Glass breaks when it's tossed in with paper and cardboard, and the shards contaminate the paper to the point where it can't be recycled into new paper products.
Pulling glass into its own stream solves that problem. Pure glass can be recycled back into new bottles and jars indefinitely, and the cleaner paper stream can be recycled into higher-grade products.
Glass-only bins are typically collected monthly because the volume per household is lower than mixed recycling. Set a calendar reminder; it's the easiest collection to forget.
Wyndham City, Yarra, Stonnington and several other Victorian councils currently run separate glass collections. Other states are watching the results closely. Use Bin Night Tonight to see whether your council currently collects glass separately, or if you need to put glass in the regular yellow bin.