A weekly food and organic waste service trialled in the northern suburbs has seen landfill collection reduced to fortnightly, with indications a citywide rollout will do the same.

For families who compost, including Angela Byron in O'Connor, it's plastic causing a problem, not food waste.

Ms Byron said household soft plastics, which currently must be dropped at Coles and Woolworths, should be prioritised for waste-reduction.

She said her drop-off point at Macquarie shops was not coping with demand, with plastics "piled high" last time she'd been in.

In an effort to make recycling soft plastic easier for his community, Daniel Conroy had started collecting residents' soft plastics at his café, The Knox Made in Watson.

He said, before long, staff were doing multiple trips to Dickson Woolworths each day.

"I had days where my staff were taking 14 of those [120 litre bags] down, they'd turn up with two trolley loads of soft plastics," Mr Conroy said.

According to Mr Conroy, Woolworths began turning his staff away, saying the soft plastic was going to landfill as the supermarket couldn't cope.

Asked whether this was the case, a Woolworths spokeswoman said bins were intended for individual customers and weren't designed to handle commercial volumes.

Woolworths said each month it sends as much as two tonnes of soft plastic to be recycled from its Dickson store alone.

Mr Conroy has since started a petition lobbying the ACT government for a solution to the huge amount of soft plastics ending up in landfill each year.

"We want to not only reduce our waste, but actually see where we can make a difference in our local community," he said.

According to ACT government, roughly one-third of the household rubbish bin is food, meaning around 26,000 tonnes of food waste goes to landfill annually.

The figure is based on a 2018 report, which includes the aspirational target of 90 per cent of waste diverted from landfill by 2025.

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Julie Boulton, project manager at Monash University Sustainable Development Institute, said it was one thing to set ambitious targets, but only if the reality matched up.

"Are we sure that our landfill is full of food waste at the moment and that's now going to be put in the food waste bin?" she asked.

"It's awesome for the government to put these measures in place for food waste, having that option is really, really important.

"But it's a really different issue to then talk about collecting our landfill rubbish and our recycling every couple of weeks - the two issues are not related."

Ms Boulton said her problem was with recycling building up, which stemmed from not being able to avoid plastics, no matter how carefully people shopped.

"There is a bigger issue at play here and there must be something that can be done to reduce all the packaging in the first place," she said.

Ms Boulton helped develop the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which looked at responsible production and consumption, with a national target of halved food waste by 2030.

She said there was more to reducing food waste than choosing the right bin, including sensible grocery shopping and having the knowledge to use what was in the pantry.

"We also know that a lot of food waste happens before the food even gets to the supermarket, so there's a whole lot of work that needs to be done and a whole lot of behavioural change that needs to happen," Ms Boulton said.

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