SEVERAL local entities featured in the recently announced Waste Sorted Awards, a state government initiative which rewards innovation in avoiding and diverting food waste to solutions for recovering value from e-waste and preventing construction material from going to landfill.

The Shire of Northam won the Regional Local Government/Regional Council Award for its innovative approach to recycling.

Shire of Northam operates two waste management facilities, the largest is at Old Quarry Road Northam, with a smaller rural facility at Inkpen Road in Copley Wundowie. 

The facilities also provide waste management services to surrounding areas, including York, Cunderdin, Kellerberrin and Toodyay. 

The increase in recycling resulting from the operation of the two facilities has resulted in 152,859kg of waste being diverted from landfill.

Also winning an award was the Repair Café in Bassendean which provides regular, free repair services to the community by fixing people’s broken household items. 

Not only does this save items from landfill, it avoids the resource consumption associated with purchasing replacement items. 

Highly commended in their categories were the East Metropolitan Council (Metro Local Government/Regional Council Award) and Mash Brewing from West Swan (Innovation Award) who work closely with another highly commended entrant, Donut Waste (Closing the Loop Award).

After successfully using yeast-based foods like donuts and Christmas puddings with other social enterprise partners like Lions and Donut Waste in two previous years to produce special beers, Mash Brewery learned that fruit bread returned from the market usually ended up in landfill. 

So, the brewers decided to create a beer where they would substitute some of the grain with fruit bread. 

The recipe they came up with removes over 100kg of food waste from land fill, creates approximately 1800 meals for the less fortunate as a by-product (distributed by Oz Harvest), and reduces the amount of grain needed in the beer by almost 25 per cent.

As a final benefit, the brewing process also reduced the sugar content in the fruit bread to a point where the spent grain and fruit bread can be used as livestock feed.