Sort out waste issues

IT has been almost two months since Corio Waste Management director Matt Dickens pronounced the death of the household yellow recycling bin.

His bold declaration came amid the depths of the recycling crisis, when EPA sanctions against two of the state’s biggest recycling plants forced all five of our local councils to dump household recycling into landfill.

While local kerbside recycling collection might have since resumed, the greater problem that Mr Dickens was referring to remains.

This time last year, China tightened its requirement on what was the acceptable standard of recycling it would accept, effectively halting any exports from Australia. The problem, it seems, was that too much of the recycling material we were shipping over to China was arriving contaminated. Our sloppiness in recycling had made our waste unsustainable for the overseas market.

Mr Dickens said even before the closure of the SKM plants in February, there had been rumours of large collections of recycled waste ending up in landfill. He advocated for an overhaul of the way we currently tackled recycling, which could include a series of smaller bins to further sort our waste so that our recycling material could be cleaner.

Today City of Greater Geelong Mayor Bruce Harwood, a company director with plenty of experience of his own in the waste industry, has proposed that some of the problem could be alleviated by a fourth kerbside bin especially for paper recycling. Council research has shown that almost half of what we are putting in our yellow bins is paper and cardboard and that, if it was presorted and clean, it was far more likely to meet the 99.5 per cent purity standard that China currently requires.

Cr Harwood’s proposal is in the same vein as Mr Dickens’ advice two months ago and shows the type of big picture thinking needed if we are to figure our way through this crisis.

It is a good start to a challenging issue.