Waste or food waste? Knowing the difference makes a difference

Not everything that is left over is waste.

Many of the residues we produce every day still have value and can gain a new life when delivered to the right place. This is the case of biowaste and organic residues, such as food scraps and green waste, which can be transformed into new resources.

What are food residues?

Food and green residues are organic materials that can be recovered instead of being discarded as waste. In the brown bin you can place:

In the green bin you can place your green waste:

These materials represent an important share of what we produce every day and can be recovered through home and community composting or selective collection.

When delivered to LIPOR, these residues are sent for organic recovery and transformed into NUTRIMAIS, a range of products developed for agriculture, produced with quality, rigour and environmental sustainability criteria.

Waste is what remains after we correctly separate everything that can be recycled or recovered, such as paper, plastic, glass and, of course, organic residues.

Only materials with no possibility of reuse should be placed in the waste bin, for example: kitchen paper or napkins, nappies, wipes and sanitary pads.

In other words, everything that can be recycled or recovered must follow the correct stream. Waste is only what can no longer be used.

At LIPOR, we say no to landfill. Instead of being buried and forgotten, non-recoverable waste is sent for energy recovery.

More than twenty-five years ago, we believed it was possible to do things differently. We invested in an innovative solution with the Energy Recovery Plant, transforming residues into energy - enough to supply a small city of around one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants every day.

If all this waste were sent to landfill, thousands of hectares of land would be needed and valuable resources would be lost.

This is the path of the circular economy: prevent, reuse, recycle, recover and invest in increasingly modern solutions to reduce waste and decrease dependence on landfills.

Because what today seems like a simple residue may, in fact, be a resource for tomorrow.