Page 4773 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 10 November 2009

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National Recycling Week

MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (4.47): I rise today to talk about National Recycling Week, particularly the swap event which was held this lunch time. I understand that Mr Seselja has already mentioned it. I also went along to it. I am not tabling this, but I show what I bought there. For the benefit of Hansard, it is a very nice oval yellow bowl with gold around the outside.

Mrs Dunne: Yes, but he gave away my cricket bat.

MS LE COUTEUR: He gave away your cricket bat? Mrs Dunne, I can report that it had been swapped by the time I got there. There was no cricket bat at the great swap meet.

One of the other wonderful things about being there was Mic Conway, who is a musician who I first must have listened to at least 30 years ago—maybe 40 years ago—but who is still one of my favourites. It was a great event. It is a bit like our Second-hand Sunday but a lot more formalised.

One of the other great things about this was that I was speaking to the lady organising it, Kim Host, who is the national sustainability manager for Jones Lang LaSalle. This is not meant to be a commercial for them, but she was saying that they have a sustainability program for all their landlords. They have a sustainability program for all their tenants—and they have 30 different tenant groups across Australia—with the aim of trying to ensure that they are all more sustainable.

One of the things that she said they were particularly working on was recyclable coffee cups. It had not particularly occurred to me—I am not nasty and suspicious enough—that apparently with a lot of the recyclable coffee mugs that you get they have done the work and found that a lot of them are not recyclable. They are going to try to organise that their tenants at least get recyclable ones. As she said, a huge amount of the volume of their rubbish is coffee mugs.

You could say, “Why don’t we go a bit further, go to reusable and actually taking your coffee mug?” But it is really important that if things are labelled recyclable they are recyclable. What is probably even more important is that we have not just got the Greens talking about recycling and waste—we have been doing that for a long time—but we have got the big end of town taking it seriously.

That was a very heartening event to go to at lunch time. I hope that there will be many more recycling events, small and big, because we need them all to make a better world.

Erindale College academy awards

MR DOSZPOT (Brindabella) (4.50): A few weeks ago, on 28 October, I had the pleasure of being the guest of Erindale college and the college principal, Mr Michael Hall. I, along with my Assembly colleague Amanda Bresnan, was invited


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