Below is a list of Ballarat's bin collection schedule (plus bin lid colours):
- Rubbish (weekly/red lid)
- Recycling (fortnightly/yellow lid)
- Green waste (fortnightly/green lid)
- Food scraps (N/A)
- Glass (As of 30 September, glass is no longer allowed in yellow household recycling bins in the City of Ballarat. Instead, residents are asked to drop off their glass bottles and jars at the eight free Council-operated drop-off sites across the municipality as part of our Pass on Glass campaign. As a last resort, residents can put their glass in their rubbish bins to go to landfill. Residents can request a Council-supplied crate made from 100 per cent recyclable materials to store and transport their glass recyclables to the drop-off points.)
The City of Ballarat reacted quickly to the recycling crisis. Unlike many other councils, we refused to send our kerbside recyclables to landfill and instead set up a local sorting facility in partnership with an existing recycler of commercial, building and demolition products. This required modification to their equipment and processes.
It was a great short-term solution but not a sustainable long-term option for either party. This process was used to better understand what types of material can be used locally and where it actually can go. Contaminated recycling does and will go to landfill. Contaminates that significantly impact the useability of the product include food waste, green waste, bagged rubbish, food or liquids inside containers, hoses or conduit, and broken furniture.
The response to keeping glass out has been fantastic. The next step is to drastically reduce the items that contaminate whole loads of recycling.
Keeping glass out is resulting in cleaner paper and plastics - it is a great result and we encourage residents to continue this.
Council has now entered into a new agreement with Victorian company Australian Paper Recovery (APR) which has good local markets for paper, cans and plastics, with all materials being recycled and repurposed. The company is committed to growing these local markets and to providing information back to Council on where the product ends up.
APR is focusing on the recovery and reprocessing of clean paper, cardboard, plastics and metals. The manufacturers APR are working with do not want a product that has glass shards throughout. The decision to not include glass is directly related to getting a higher value, cleaner product from the kerbside stream. The separation of glass is to assist in providing a product that can be used locally.
There are some companies in Australia that are able to reprocess glass. Through the current body of work around policy and regulatory framework, Council will be working to understand what the opportunities and barriers to this are. This market is in flux and, in the interim, alternative uses for glass are being investigated and trialled. They largely include utilising the crushed glass as a replacement sand material.
Almost one month into our Pass on Glass campaign, not one kilogram of the glass collected at the drop-off sites has gone to landfill. We are aggregating all glass to have volumes available for recycling uses as we firm up arrangements with other partners.
We are currently working on a crushing trial in the next two months. Council's intent is to use all glass recovered for the highest and best recycling purpose, with this ideally being for the production of food and drink-class containers of the future. However, the market within Australia is reasonably limited and we are therefore exploring less high-end uses, such as road-making materials and the like, to maximise the re-use of our collected glass.
Clean and empty plastic bottles and containers from the kitchen, laundry and bathroom - along with paper, cardboard and cans - are the products that are being targeted for capture for further use. For a detailed list of do's and don'ts, check out the A-Z waste guide at recyclingballarat.com
We are really encouraging residents to place clean and empty product into their recycling bins.
To be a great recycler, there are some simple rules - empty and clean containers from the kitchen, laundry and bathroom.
If we achieve this with the majority of households, this will improve the certainty with which the product can be recovered and reprocessed.
Prior to the Pass on Glass campaign, the City of Ballarat's contamination rate was approximately 17 per cent and consistent with contamination levels experienced in Victoria.
The Pass on Glass campaign is backed by an ongoing extensive media campaign targeting not only glass, but also key contaminates such as bagged recyclables and bagged general rubbish and reiterating to community the importance to place only clean recyclables (no liquid or food residue) in yellow lid recycling bins.
In the coming weeks, the City of Ballarat will have sufficient data to monitor outcomes.
