Details of the requirement have been published ahead of the January 1 deadline for waste collectors to offer a brown bin service to all their customers.
Around 30pc of households, roughly 600,000 homes, currently have no brown bin. The majority are in rural areas but others live in urban apartments and suburbs.
Most have regular black bin and recycling (green bin) collections, however. Where those services are available, the collector will now also have to offer a brown bin.
Only off-shore islands are exempt from the new regulations.
Charges for brown bins vary depending on the waste collector, with some companies not charging at all.
Others apply a fee, rationalising that households can make the money back by saving on their pay-by-weight black bin collection when they stop putting food and garden waste in it.
Environment Minister Eamon Ryan, who signed the new rules into law yesterday, said they were designed to ensure better segregation of waste, allowing for more recycling and composting.
“A recently published study by the Environmental Protection Agency showed that 21pc of the contents of the household residual waste bins (black bins) was food and garden waste,” he said.
Such waste also ends up in recycling bins, contaminating potential recyclable materials that then have to be incinerated or landfilled.
Mr Ryan added: “The added bonus of the brown bin is that the organic waste can also be used to make compost, which in turn can be used to help green our towns and cities naturally.”
While waste collectors will be obliged to offer customers a brown bin, customers will not be obliged to accept it.
However, the regulations say waste collectors will be “obliged to keep records of customers not availing of a food-waste collection service and to make this information available to the relevant local authority on request”.
Households will be “obliged to segregate food waste and either have the food waste collected by an authorised collector, compost the food waste or bring it to an authorised facility”.
The rules say: “Households not availing of a food-waste service will be required to notify their collector in writing, together with details of how they will manage their food waste.”
The consequences of refusing to provide a written explanation is unclear.
The Department of the Environment said: “The vast majority of householders want to do the right thing, so it would be expected that such an occurrence would be extremely rare.”
It added: “Waste collectors will be required to hold information on those very few householders who perhaps don’t properly segregate their food waste and provide that information to local authority enforcement staff on request.”
One waste firm that has been advising customers of the new rules has asked them to tick a box online to say how they intend to manage their waste if they don’t take a brown bin.
They can declare that they compost at home, that their pets eat any food scraps, that they share a brown bin with a neighbour, take their food waste to a civic amenity facility or to work, or none of the above.