Page 1216 - Week 03 - Thursday, 31 March 2011
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2010 of one major recycler and changes to acceptance practices and fee structures, have affected the sector’s ability to keep pace with demand. ACT NOWaste’s industry research and development officer has been working with the sector to improve recovery rates.
In 2009-10, around 103,000 tonnes of commercial waste were sent to landfill, making commercial waste the largest component of waste to landfill. There is also a long-term trend of increasing commercial waste to landfill. Businesses are responsible for arranging their own waste and recycling services, and it would be very difficult for this to be done in any other way. There is simply too much diversity. While households may differ a little—a single person will generate less than a family of five—they can generally be accommodated by a standard service. And they are still creating the same stuff—food, paper, cardboard, glass et cetera.
Businesses, however, range from the sole operator to the government agency that employs a thousand people. Restaurants generate primarily food waste, whereas offices generate primarily paper and cardboard. And it therefore makes, I think, the private sector the best place to service these diverse needs. There is a thriving local recycling industry available, from small organic recyclers who will collect food waste from a business to major waste collectors who will pick up bins and hoppers of paper, mixed recyclables and waste.
The government is supporting this industry to tackle the problem of increasing commercial waste. The Department of the Environment, Climate Change, Energy and Water has launched the ACTSmart programs which help businesses and their staff to source-separate their waste and ensure that it is then recycled once collected.
The government is also helping to establish a new recycling facility at Hume, targeting dry, commercial and industrial waste. That facility will be an end-of-life separation facility, sorting out mixed recyclables. It will not replace the need for businesses to continue source separation of major components of waste such as organic material or paper, and it is likely that clean, separated waste streams will be cheaper to recycle than any form of mixed waste. Proposals to build and operate a facility, coincidentally, closed today. The government hopes that from 2012 this new facility will be diverting as much as 40,000 tonnes of mainly commercial waste from landfill.
Waste generation and resource recovery are major challenges in a consumerist society. We are doing what we can to address increasing waste generation. But this must be done as a partnership with the community. We cannot, of course, do it alone and we cannot tell people what to buy and what not to buy.
We have measures in place to recover waste once it has been created. Many of these rely on source separation, which often achieves a clean, reliable result at reduced costs. However, source separation can only take you so far. It must be supported by facilities that provide end-of-life processing for mixed waste. We have one materials recovery facility in Canberra that targets dry, mixed kerbside waste and we hope to have another in the near future that will target dry, mixed commercial waste.
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