Face your waste

Face your waste

Published on 10 July 2018

We all produce waste, too much of it in fact.

Everything we buy and use eventually becomes waste and waste has to be disposed of. Australians send over 20 million tonnes of waste to landfill every year making us on a per capita basis one of the most wasteful nations on Earth.

For most people dealing with waste is easy. We just put it in the bin, where it remains hidden until the council takes it away.

The waste is, out of sight out of mind, it’s someone else’s problem.

Face your waste

Over the next two weeks you will see 10 sets of 240L clear waste and recycling bins around the Town of Cambridge to help as many people as possible face their waste.

The bins will be located in:

City Beach Wembley Town Centre Perry Lakes Skate Park  Lake Monger

What is waste? It is simply stuff we don’t want anymore. But it is stuff that is full of materials and energy, all just being thrown away.  Furthermore, lots more material and energy went into producing it and transporting it to shops and to you in the first place. So every bit of waste we discard actually has a far greater impact than what we think, a lot of wasted resources and energy.

We all produce waste, everything we buy or use eventually becomes waste. We need to see that waste is an issue in all its forms. We need to own the problem and appreciate that we all have to do our part.

We need to look at the waste we produce and identify what can be done to produce less waste.

Waste also is expensive to deal with, dispose of, and has many negative environmental issues associated with it.

For too long the focus has been on dealing with the waste once it has been produced. Our best solution has been to try and recycle as much as we can to avoid sending all this waste to landfill but we need to do more. It is time to Face Your Waste. 

If we can encourage people to produce less waste and deal with the waste they produce more effectively, it creates benefits that include:

Cost savings Improved environmental outcomes Leaving a better legacy for future generations (i.e. conservation/preservation of resources, energy and the environment; creation of new jobs and opportunities; and the development of a circular economy)

Producing waste is a problem. Be part of the solution.

Find out more about the Face Your Waste Campaign and what you can do to produce less waste.

Face Your Waste