Council leads on single-use plastics

Bayside City Council has committed to eliminating the use of single-use plastics within the Bayside Corporate Centre and its libraries by the end of the 2018/19 financial year and community centres by 2019/20.

Council will also enhance environmental conditions in relevant policy, tenders, contracts, leases and guidelines, with a particular focus on facilities that are leased from Council.

Mayor, Councillor Michael Heffernan welcomed the resolution:

“We are blessed with an enviable coastline bordering our beautiful municipality.

 “We need to get tough on the use of single-use plastics because they typically end up as litter and can have devastating effects on wildlife, including marine birds and mammals, shellfish and fish.

“Our first step is to eliminate single-use plastics in the environments we control and hope that through education, the community will follow our example.

We encourage schools, businesses and residents to think about what they can do to reduce or eliminate the use of single-use plastics,"  said Cr Heffernan.

Council is already supporting behaviour change within the community to reduce dependency on single-use plastic through:  

installation of water bottle re-filling stations along the Bay Trail, encouraging users to bring re-fillable bottles and adopting a three-year program to install more drinking fountains continuing to advocate to ban plastic bags, including information on Council’s website to avoid excess packaging development of a ‘Reducing Plastic Waste’ webpage providing facilities for collection of soft flexible plastics that cannot be recycled in the kerbside recycling service at the Bayside Corporate Centre and the Beaumaris Library supporting Council staff with KeepCups and encouraging local use.

Council has committed funds to support the introduction of these important environmental initiatives and will investigate the introduction of a local law banning the single use of plastic.