Food waste disposal units

Food waste disposal units are designed to chop up your solid food waste so that it goes down your sink pipe easier (instead of you scooping the food waste out of your sink and putting it in the compost bin or rubbish bin). These small bits of food waste then travel through your wastewater pipes to the council wastewater pipes and onto one of our wastewater treatment plants.

The risk is that big pieces of food waste may get through the food waste disposal units and start to block either your private wastewater pipe (known as a lateral) or the council wastewater pipes. It can be quite expensive to unblock these pipes. If the food waste gets all the way through to the wastewater treatment plant it's more than likely that it will get stuck at the first step of the treatment process (at the screens) and end up being manually scraped off the screen and trucked off to landfill. 

Commercial kitchens are banned from having food waste disposal units and we don't recommend that domestic kitchens have them either.

It's much better for the environment if you are able to compost your food waste!