Waste Wrap Up 2019.
What a year it’s been.
We started the year by letting everyone know about the fantastic new App developed by the Loddon Mallee Waste and Resource Recovery Group. If you haven’t yet downloaded the app to your phone, it’s still free and still fantastic! There is are informative FAQs and Recycling Myths sections available which help to answer all those tricky questions about what goes where.
Then we really took off with our Terracycle collecting at the Sustainable Living Festival. This was a great event, and we not only collected plenty of old toothbrushes, coffee pods and other bits and pieces, we showcased a Wash Against Waste trailer which helped the Festival go waste-free, proving that an event of over 4000 people can produce only one small garbage bin of landfill.
Other highlights of the year include:
Working with Macedon Primary School as the senior kids spent a year focussing on waste and recycling.
The announcements by Council first that they are rolling out a FOGO organics collection in 2020 which will significantly improve our waste to landfill rates and reduce methane in the atmosphere, and also…
That they are separating glass from kerbside recycling, helping Australia’s domestic recycling industry by encouraging better separation at source – the holy grail of good recycling practice. We still have a long way to go, but Macedon Ranges Shire Council has made big improvements to our waste and recycling collection in a year of adversity and change.
Giving a talk at Woodend Library about the R’s – how to refuse single-use plastics, reduce your overall waste consumption and how to recycle effectively so that you really do know what goes where. We find it very rewarding to talk to people about what they can do to manage their waste properly and we hope to do more of this in the coming year.
Returning over 40kgs of waste to Terracycle that would otherwise have gone to landfill.
However, 2019 is the year that we started to feel the pain of our waste emergency. With overseas recycling no longer an option, kerbside recycling in Australia ground to a halt. Perfectly recyclable items continue to go into landfill. We have lost trust in systems we previously took for granted.
Plastics continue to be our biggest headache, with few options available to recycle items made to be used for only a few seconds before being discarded. We are drowning in disposable plastic.
You only have to take a short walk around the Macedon Ranges to see how overwhelming our addiction to plastic packaging is, and to see how easily it enters the environments and water systems. Plastic litter in our region is getting worse and worse.
It’s clear that not only does our behaviour need to change drastically, but we also need better systems in place to support that change. We need a whole lot less plastic packaging on our food and daily items.
We need to turn off the production tap if we have any hope of holding back the plastic tsunami.
State and federal governments want to burn our waste for energy. That is, to construct a waste-management system that locks in our current rates of consumption, encourages our poor recycling habits and continues to under-invest in our domestic recycling industry by burning huge volumes of trash. Some solution.
Waste is a system, and system change is rarely fast or easy to achieve.
We need to work together if we want to make progress.
A good start is to join this group.
See you in 2020!
