By the Bin Night Tonight team · Updated July 2026
Households that get a FOGO bin and already run a compost heap face a genuinely new question: which one gets the scraps? The satisfying answer is that this is not a competition. The two systems are good at different things, and the strongest setup uses both.
Home composting is cold (or at best warm) decomposition: a backyard bin, heap or worm farm working at ambient temperatures over months, producing compost for your own garden. FOGO is industrial: council collected food and garden organics processed at commercial facilities that hold the material at high temperatures for weeks, killing pathogens and weed seeds and producing compost sold into farms, parks and landscaping.
The temperature difference is the whole story. A backyard heap rarely gets hot enough to safely break down the difficult items, which is why the home compost rulebook is long and the FOGO rulebook is short.
Commercial processing handles the things every compost guide tells you to keep out of the heap:
The backyard system wins on everything it can handle. The output stays in your garden instead of leaving in a truck, there are no transport emissions, and fruit and veg scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells, garden trimmings and shredded paper become soil you would otherwise buy in bags. Worm farms add castings and worm tea, which gardeners treat as currency.
Home systems also have no collection schedule. The compost bin does not care what week it is, which makes it the pressure valve for the fortnights when the green bin is already full.
Run both and split by material: fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee and garden clippings to the home compost or worm farm; meat, dairy, cooked food, citrus, oily things and weedy or diseased garden waste to the FOGO bin. Households doing this send almost nothing organic to the red bin, which is the entire point of both systems; food waste in landfill generates methane, and it is roughly a third of the average general waste bin by weight.
If you only have one system, no guilt either way. FOGO alone captures everything with zero effort beyond a kitchen caddy. Compost alone captures most of the volume and improves your garden. The only losing move is the red bin.
FOGO has one strict rule: no plastic, including bags labelled biodegradable. Use the certified compostable liners your council specifies (look for the Australian certification logos, AS 4736 or AS 5810), paper, or no liner at all. Plastic bags are the number one FOGO contaminant, and enough of them gets a load rejected to landfill. Home compost has the same rule for the same reason, plus its own classics: no glossy magazines, and go easy on the grass clippings in one dump unless you enjoy slime.
In most FOGO services yes, and it is exactly what FOGO is for, since home compost cannot handle them safely. Check your council's accepted list, as a small number of services are garden-plus-fruit-and-veg only.
No, only certified compostable ones (AS 4736 or AS 5810 logos) where your council allows liners at all. "Biodegradable" plastic bags are ordinary contamination and can get a whole load rejected. Paper or no liner always works.
Yes, for everything it handles well: fruit and veg scraps, coffee, garden trimmings. The output feeds your own garden and there is no waiting for collection day. Send FOGO the difficult items (meat, dairy, cooked food) and let both systems do what they are best at.