According to Wales Online, every household in Wales will be recycling all its food waste within 12 to 18 months, says the chair of Waste Awareness Wales.At the moment most of Wales’ 22 counties are recycling some food waste, with all planning to phase in complete collection services. At the end of this month Wrexham will become the latest Welsh local authority to operate a county-wide collection service. Currently around one-third of all the food bought in Wales – with a value of £500m – is binned.

Waste Awareness Wales chair Aled Roberts expects all authorities to be running full collection services inside 12 to 18 months. The service will go beyond the usual vegetable and fruit peelings and garden waste that tend to be composted and involve the collection of all food waste including meat.

A spokesperson for the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) said as things stand around half of all households in Wales get their food waste collected. The WAG has set a target of 70% for recycling and composting of all household waste by 2025. Of this target it wants 16% of all waste recycled or composted by 2025 to be food.

A WAG spokesperson said: “We understand all 22 local authorities in Wales now have some form of food collection service or pilot underway and 47% of householders in Wales have a food waste collection service.”

The drive to recycle food waste is driven by the fact that the available space in Wales’ 15 landfill sites is fast running out. If the nation keeps generating waste at today’s levels, its landfill sites will be at capacity in just eight years.

And there are strict landfill reduction targets and penalty fines for local councils that fail to meet them. Plus, the rotting rubbish in landfill releases methane – a harmful greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO2. It’s estimated a national roll-out of food waste collections could help divert an additional 330,000 tonnes of waste out of landfill.

Most Welsh local authorities are enrolled in a national programme to secure anaerobic digesters to treat food waste. These control and treat food waste to kill all pathogens before producing liquid and solid compost that can be used for agriculture. The by-product of this “digestion” process – a bio-gas – can also be recovered to produce heat and drive turbines, generating energy for power plants or local homes and schools.

Wales Green Party leader Jake Griffiths welcomed the roll-out of food waste collection, but said the Assembly’s target of 70% of household waste being recycled by 2025 was unambitious. Recycling and composting rates currently stand at about 36%. He said that in Flanders in Belgium they already recycled 70% of their waste.

He said: “We have to recognise just how far Wales is behind.”