Green top bin (food and garden waste) - Let's sort it!
It’s important to recycle your food and garden waste if you can. We collect your food and garden waste from the green top bins and it is then sent to an in-vessel composting (IVC) facility in Cambridge, where it's turned into agricultural fertiliser and soil improver. That means your vegetable peelings and gardens cuttings will eventually be turned into something that could help grow more food!
It is also cheaper for the council to turn food waste into compost than it is to incinerate it. By recycling your food waste, you are helping to protect the environment and save public money.
We can only provide separate food waste bins in blocks of flats where there is internal storage for them.
Food waste
Food waste refers to all cooked and uncooked food, including:
- fruit and vegetables
- meat, fish and bone
- plate scrapings
- rice, pasta and bread
- tea bags and coffee grounds.
Garden waste
Garden waste includes:
- grass, hedge and shrub cuttings
- leaves and weeds
- plants and flowers
- straw, hay and sawdust
- tree bark and small branches (less than 50mm or two inches in diameter)
- vegetarian pet waste (for example, from rabbits, guinea pigs and hamsters)
Not in the green bin
Please don't put plastic bin liners, plastic sacks, carrier bags or degradable/biodegradable sacks in your green-top bin as they don't break down quickly enough.
Compostable packaging
There is now more packaging which claims to be compostable, such as certain coffee cups and bioplastic. Unfortunately, we cannot accept these items along with your food and garden waste, so please do not put these in your green top bin. It very difficult for our crew to identify these items as compostable as they look identical to other types of packaging and we cannot guarantee that it is made from a material that we are able to recycle.
Using your kitchen caddy
Residents can request a six-litre kitchen caddy to store food waste in until there is enough to put into the bins or sacks for collection.
Corn starch and paper liners and sacks are suitable for holding your food and garden waste - please don't use plastic bags.
Make sure that the sacks you use carry the 'compostable' sign.
Check out the leaflet with all this information and more.
Home composting equipment
We work with a company called Straight PLC to provide composting bins and equipment to residents.
Buy home composting equipment (Get Composting website)
Reduce food waste
We support the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, which encourages people to shop, cook and store food wisely.
Learn how to reduce food waste (Love Food Hate Waste website)
We also support an organisation that's closer to home, called Good Food in Greenwich. Its aim is to bring people and organisations together, to help make Greenwich a fairer, healthier, and more sustainable borough. It wants Greenwich to be known as a great place for good food by all who live, study, work or visit here. Find out more about it here.