Australia turned food scraps into biogas at EarthPower; the result powered 4,000 homes while processing 62,500 tonnes of food waste and producing soil improver in Sydney

Every day, food that looks useless to us begins a very different journey in Sydney. Fruit and vegetable scraps, food-processing waste, liquid organic waste and other suitable food materials can be collected instead of being sent straight to landfill. They are taken to EarthPower, a food waste-to-energy facility in Camellia, where bacteria do something surprisingly useful with them.

Inside sealed tanks, the waste is broken down without oxygen. The process produces biogas. That gas is then used to generate electricity, while the remaining organic material is processed into a nutrient-rich soil improver.

After a major upgrade in 2024, EarthPower's designed processing capacity rose to 62,500 tonnes of food waste a year. At full capacity, the facility can generate enough electricity to supply the equivalent of about 4,000 homes through the local grid.


The interesting part is not simply that food waste can produce energy. It is what happens to the material after the energy has been extracted.

Instead of treating food waste as the end of a product's useful life, EarthPower treats it as a resource that still has something to give.

Sydney Is Turning Food Waste Into Energy: Inside the EarthPower Plant That Can Process 62,500 Tonnes of Waste

Food waste creates a disposal problem long after the meal is finished. Australia produces an estimated 559 kilograms of municipal solid waste per person each year, with food waste accounting for up to 56% of that total, according to the figures cited by EarthPower’s operator, Veolia.

ALSO READ: Seoul used 1 daylighted buried stream to solve urban heat issues across 10km of concrete highway; the result transformed an asphalt corridor into a cool public park

Organic waste sent to landfill can also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions as it decomposes. EarthPower takes a different approach by treating food waste as a resource rather than something with no further use.

The facility was designed to accept organic material from a wide range of sources across the Sydney region. That includes food manufacturers, processors, distributors, retailers, commercial kitchens and local governments.

How does EarthPower turn food scraps into energy?

The central technology at EarthPower is anaerobic digestion, a process that allows microorganisms to break down organic material without oxygen. As bacteria digest the food waste, they produce biogas containing methane and other gases.

EarthPower captures that biogas rather than allowing the energy contained in the waste to disappear. The gas is then used to fuel cogeneration engines, which produce electricity for the facility and the wider grid.

That process creates a useful cycle. Food waste enters the plant as a disposal problem, while the output includes renewable energy and a recoverable material that can be used to improve soil.

EarthPower can handle several forms of organic waste, including solid food waste, grease-trap waste, organic liquid waste, spadable sludge and selected packaged waste. This flexibility allows material from different parts of the food supply chain to enter the same resource-recovery system.

What changed after EarthPower’s 2024 upgrade?

A major technological upgrade in 2024 increased EarthPower’s feedstock capacity to 62,500 tonnes of food waste. That expansion matters because the amount of organic waste generated by a large metropolitan area can be difficult to manage through conventional disposal systems alone.

The upgraded facility is capable of producing enough electricity to supply approximately 4,000 homes. The electricity generated is sold to the grid for use by domestic, commercial and industrial customers.

EarthPower also uses part of its own energy production to operate the facility. Its electricity and gas production help meet the plant’s internal energy needs before excess electricity is distributed to the grid.

The result is a system in which the waste stream supplies part of the energy required to process itself, while also creating additional electricity for the community.

What happens to the material left after digestion?

Energy is not the only useful product recovered at EarthPower. Anaerobic digestion also leaves behind a nutrient-rich sludge containing material that can be processed further.

The sludge is dried using heat from the cogeneration engines and then granulated. It is subsequently sold for use in agricultural and horticultural markets as a soil improver.

That gives the process a second recovery pathway. Instead of treating the remaining material as another waste product, EarthPower turns it into something that can return nutrients to productive land.

The combination of biogas production and soil-product recovery is central to the facility’s resource-recovery model. Waste that might otherwise have ended its journey in landfill is separated into useful outputs.

Could Sydney’s food waste become a bigger energy resource?

EarthPower illustrates how organic waste can become part of a local energy and resource system rather than simply a disposal burden. Its 62,500-tonne annual processing capacity shows the scale at which anaerobic digestion can operate when food waste is collected from businesses, industries and public-sector sources.

There are practical limits to such systems. They depend on suitable organic waste streams, collection networks and facilities capable of handling different materials safely and efficiently. The environmental benefits also depend on what the waste would otherwise have done and how the recovered energy and products are used.

Still, the Sydney facility demonstrates a straightforward principle: food waste contains both energy and nutrients that do not necessarily need to be lost. EarthPower’s model captures the biogas for electricity, uses recovered heat within the process and turns the remaining material into soil improver.

At a time when cities are searching for ways to reduce landfill use while producing more renewable energy, that combination makes food waste a resource with a surprisingly practical second life.