Lots of happy faces in Freo

City of Fremantle residents can expect to see lots of happy faces in their neighbourhood in the coming weeks as part of a recycling education program.

Starting this week, the Southern Metropolitan Regional Council (SMRC) is undertaking a bin audit on behalf of the City of Fremantle, City of Melville and Town of East Fremantle.

Households that are doing a good job of separating out their waste and recycling will get a happy face tag placed on their bin, while those with room for improvement will get a sad face.

Fremantle Mayor Brad Pettitt said given that Fremantle was ranked in the top five of Perth’s best recyclers he was confident there would be lots of happy faces.

“I’m sure most people in Fremantle want to do the right thing and are doing their best to make sure their waste and recycling goes into the right bin,” Mayor Pettitt said.

“But there are times when it can be a little confusing, and there are few things that people might not be aware of that can mean their recycling can’t be processed and ends up in landfill.

“This audit program is not about the ‘bin police’ going through people’s rubbish or penalising people for not recycling properly.

“It’s all about educating people, providing feedback and clearing up any confusion people may have so we can reduce contamination, recycle better and have less waste going to landfill.

“In other local governments where this program has already been run they saw a substantial improvement in recycling rates, and a follow up audit a year later showed that those rates had been maintained, so that’s what we’re hoping to see in Fremantle as well.”

The bin audit and education program, supported by funding from the state government, is part of the roll out of the new three-bin FOGO system that was introduced to Fremantle last year.

Over the next five weeks Community Waste Education Officers will work in pairs to make a visual inspection of the bin’s contents prior to pick up on collection day.

Following inspection, they will place a ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ tag on the handle of the bin which provides feedback about how well residents are using the bins or what can be improved.

The tags will be in line with the bin lid colours – green for the FOGO bin, yellow for the Recycling bin and red for the General Waste bin.

Common recycling mistakes include putting recycling into bags instead of loose into the bin, putting soft scrunchable plastic into the recycling and not removing the lids from bottles and containers.

For more information how to recycle correctly visit the Recycle Right website.