Have your say: Draft Waste, Litter and Resource Recovery Strategy 2020-2030

As our city continues to grow and change, waste management plays an important part in building a sustainable city.

To help plan for how we will manage and reduce waste and litter over the next 10 years in Maroondah, Council has developed a new Draft Waste, Litter and Resource Recovery Strategy 2020-2030, which is now open for community feedback until Thursday 4 March 2021.

The draft strategy sets targets and identifies actions to reduce waste, increase resource recovery, lower greenhouse gas emissions and educate the community on the importance of avoiding waste.

Councillor Marijke Graham, one of Council’s representatives on the Maroondah Environment Advisory Committee, said the cost of sending waste to landfill was increasing, as were the costs of processing recoverable waste.

“In the 2019-20 financial year Maroondah sent 20,144 tonnes of waste to landfill and generated 11,259 tonnes of mixed recycling and 15,261 of garden waste. We need to look for alternatives, such as composting food waste with our garden waste and seeking advanced waste treatment alternatives for our landfill waste,” Cr Graham said.

“This will reduce our reliance on landfill and create jobs to ensure resources in our landfill bins are circulated back through the economy,” she said.

“Encouragingly, Maroondah households create less waste than the average Melbourne household, but as our population increases we risk sending more and more material to landfill, losing precious natural resources,” Cr Graham said.

The four key outcome areas of this Strategy will provide the framework to achieve:

“Thank you to everyone who contributed to the development of the draft Waste, Litter and Resource Recovery Strategy 2020-2030. We are now asking for the community’s feedback to ensure our proposed targets and actions align with community needs and aspirations,” Cr Graham said.

“Reducing waste is something in all of our control and can be as simple as switching to reusable alternatives such reusable coffee cups, using a shopping list, composting our food waste, cooking with our leftovers, or shopping in bulk,” she said.

Over the past two years, Victoria has been greatly impacted by the change in global markets for recyclable materials, which was largely the result of China introducing restrictions on the type of waste imports it will accept.

“Australia’s federal and state governments have been undertaking a lot of work in the waste and recycling area since the recycling crisis highlighted some of the systemic issues facing this sector, including measures by COAG (Council of Australian Governments) agreeing to establish a timetable to ban the export of waste, plastic, paper, glass and tyres,” Cr Graham said.

“This ban provides an opportunity for us to reassess our sorting habits, making sure that what we put in the bin are acceptable items so that we can support our growing domestic recycling and reprocessing markets,” she said.

“Creating less waste has many benefits, including less pollution from the extraction of raw materials, less chance of litter being created, more jobs to repair and recover resources, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and a sustainable environment for future generations,” Cr Graham added.

The community is invited to provide feedback on the draft strategy and the proposed targets and actions up until the closing date of Thursday 4 March. This feedback will be considered and used to develop the final strategy, which will be presented to Council in July 2021.

Have your say on the Draft Waste, Litter and Resource Recovery Strategy 2020-2030.

For further information, please contact us on 1300 88 22 33 or 9298 4598.