A Hindmarsh Shire Council official has questioned suggestions to solve Victoria's recycling issues, ahead of a briefing on a new report in Melbourne on Wednesday October 30.
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Director of infrastructure services Angela Hoy said the council was mainly concerned about a proposal for residents to separate their waste into five different bins.
The proposal is one of many contained in Infrastructure Victoria's interim report to the state government this month, titled Recycling and resource recovery infrastructure.
The report will make recommendations on the infrastructure required, and the role of government to reduce Victoria's reliance on overseas markets to dispose of waste material.
Among the recommendations the report makes is improving the ability to separate recycling at the source to reduce contamination.
"Victoria's current co-mingled system does not produce sufficiently clean streams to support end markets for recycled materials," the report said. "Best practice jurisdictions separate at least five types of materials at source (organics, plastics, paper and card, glass, metals)."
Ms Hoy said the government had not indicated who would pay for extra bins.
"Who will pay to educate the public on how to use the new bins?," she said.
"The state government is considering standardising what Victorian Councils have, so that metropolitan and regional councils have the same number, size, type and colour of bins, but how they will achieve that we don't know.
"We've heard the government is also considering raising landfill levies to discourage the sending of waste to landfill, which seems like putting more of the onus onto the ratepayer to recycle rather than the recycling plants."
West Wimmera Shire chief executive David Leahy said he thought greater separation of waste would help, but too many more bins would be difficult for small shires to handle in practice.
"It would mean more filling and emptying," he said.
"At the moment we have comingled recycling and putrescible waste collected on the same day. Adding more bins would mean there would be at least two bin collections every week, and that would create extra road miles."
West Wimmera, Hindmarsh and Yarriambiack Shires contract Rainbow company Wimmera Mallee Waste to handle its kerbside collections, while Horsham Rural City Council contracts Wheelie Waste. Mr Leahy said the shire's waste volumes were low, and it could result in Wimmera Mallee Waste needing to do a lot of short trips.
"Having to do multiple trips to fill half a truck is not the most efficient way of doing things, so if the waste was separated more it might end up in them having to purchase more equipment," he said.
"None of us small shires in Western Victoria have our own resource sheds, so it all has to be transported to a central point. We would probably have to secure volumes of recycled waste at our transfer stations until it got to the point where it could fill a skip bin."
Mr Leahy said councils using more recycled products in their work was a topic of discussion at the weekend's Municipal Association of Victoria meeting in Melbourne.
"We cab bleat about recycling all we like, but there needs to be a commitment to use repurposed products in things like wheel stops and speed humps," he said.
"We can use plastics, rubber and glass in asphalt material - if we don't make commitment to use the product we're separating it would arrest that impetus. We had discussion this morning with (the council's) procurement representative to look at any possibilities on how we can incorporate reusing materials into contract specifications."
Infrastructure Victoria's final recommendations will go to state government in April 2020. Project director Elissa McNamara said it was too early to determine who would pay for a scheme involving more bins.
"We presented some very early findings and potential actions for government," she said.
"One of the things we have heard from stakeholders in Western Victoria is the impact higher transport costs have on their waste management. We will be looking at where it might make sense to have more reprocessing, which would me more jobs in the regions."
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