Where does your food waste go?

What’s just over 600 adult African male elephants got to do with food recycling in the county?

Well, that’s the weight of food waste sent off for recycling thanks to the effort of residents from April 2024 to March 2025.

To put it into another perspective, the amount bagged and recycled by Denbighshire communities during this period is equivalent to seven fully loaded Airbus A380 airplanes standing side by side with three maximum weight capacity A320 aircrafts.

Residents recycled 4,204 tonnes for the period, an actual increase of 588 tonnes of food waste from 2024 to 2025.

That’s collected from over 47,000 properties and included in approximately 73,000 collections per week across all waste streams in the county.

Waste collected in the special biodegradable bags supplied by us included items from household kitchens and dinner tables such as

• Used teabags
• Coffee grounds
• Eggshells
• Fruit
• Vegetable peelings
• Raw and cooked meat and fish, including bones
• Plate scrapings or leftovers that can’t be safely stored to eat later
• Food that’s no longer safe to eat

And thanks to everyone’s efforts, these items by not filling out valuable landfill space are supporting our communities.

Collected at our Waste Station at Denbigh, all food recycling bags are taken to a plant facility run by Biogen near Rhuallt.

The food waste goes through a process called Anaerobic digestion which helps to produce biogas and biofertilizer. This happens in a sealed, oxygen-free tank called an anaerobic digester.

Biogas at the plant is captured and used to power efficient gas engines producing renewable electricity to support the grid. This also helps tackle climate change as gas given off by the food is trapped in a controlled environment instead of left to build over open air landfills.

The remaining biofertiliser is put back to the land to grow more crop to produce more food for the family table.

Thanking residents for their food recycling efforts, Councillor Barry Mellor, Lead Member for the Environment, Highways and Transport, said: “Our residents have always been the best at recycling food but this is a monumental effort by them which goes a long way to making a positive difference our environment. Everyone who has scraped their plates into the caddies can be proud of themselves for helping put some positives back into our environment by supporting the recycling process all of our food waste goes through.”

To find out more about recycling in Denbighshire please visit this link https://www.denbighshire.gov.uk/en/bins-and-recycling/bins-recycling.aspx