Stay calm and keep recycling Fremantle

City of Fremantle residents are being urged to keep recycling because the City’s recycling is being collected and processed as normal.

A fire at waste management company Cleanaway’s materials recovery facility at South Guilford in November led to concerns that recycling from some of Perth’s local governments would be sent to landfill.

Last week Cleanaway reached an agreement with the Southern Metropolitan Regional Council (SMRC) for SMRC to receive and sort at least 50,000 tonnes per annum of kerbside recyclables. The agreement commences from today.

Fremantle Mayor Brad Pettitt welcomed the deal and said Fremantle residents could be assured their recycling would not be sent to landfill.

“Data about local government recycling rates released by the state government last year showed Fremantle was ranked in the top five of Perth’s best recyclers, so that’s a really great effort and we need to keep it up,” Mayor Pettitt said.

“People in Fremantle should continue to separate out their recycling, make sure they put it in the right bin and have confidence that their recycling will be processed in the proper way.

“Fremantle was not affected by the recent issues because, although Cleanaway is contracted to do our bin collections, our recycling was always being delivered to the SMRC’s resource recovery centre in Canning Vale for processing, not to Cleanaway’s facility in South Guilford.

“Nonetheless I’m really pleased that Cleanaway and SMRC have been able to come to an arrangement to ensure recycling from other local governments around Perth won’t end up in landfill.

“I’m also really pleased that a facility that is part-owned by the City of Fremantle - along with Melville, Kwinana and East Fremantle – will be responsible for processing the bulk of Perth’s recycling while Cleanaway rebuilds its facility.”

The Southern Metropolitan Regional Council is one of five regional councils in the Perth metropolitan area.  SMRC member councils include the City of Fremantle, City of Melville, City of Kwinana and Town of East Fremantle.

The SMRC operates the Regional Resource Recovery Centre in Canning Vale, which processes recyclables, general waste and food and garden waste collected from household bins and verge collections.

As part of its One Planet strategy the City of Fremantle has a target to support the community to reduce waste generation by 10 per cent against 2015 levels by 2020, and achieve a 70 per cent recycling rate by 2020.

In September last year the City of Fremantle became one of the first councils in Perth to introduce the new three-bin Food Organic Garden Organic waste management system, with a yellow-lidded bin for recycling, red-lidded bin for general waste and a new green-lidded bin for organic garden and food waste.

The state government’s Waste Strategy has a target for all households in the Perth and Peel region to go FOGO by 2025.

For more information visit the Waste and Recycling page on the City of Fremantle website.