Let’s Talk Rubbish!

The one thing we generally don’t think about is rubbish. We put our bins out every week, and the “bin fairies” come and empty them for us. Well, there’s a lot more to waste management than you’d think. So, here’s some interesting facts.

Most people wouldn’t be aware that sales of the materials placed in recycling bins offsets the costs of landfill. All that’s required to become better recyclers, as a community, is to start thinking about items placed in bins as materials rather than objects. There’s a very good reason why we only ask for certain items to be placed into recycling bins – they’re the materials that we can sell to reduce landfill costs and our environmental impacts.

To increase recycling awareness, council has developed an easy-to-follow “What goes where” poster. Schools and body corporates are welcome to order these free of charge to place on their premises to help improve correct recycling rates. Head to mackay.qld.gov.au to order yours.

Mackay Regional Council is leading the way as Queensland’s first organisation to use recycled soft plastics in concrete. MRC was selected as the beneficiary of 3.7 tonnes of Polyrok as part of the Wonder Recycling Rewards initiative, whereby 1000 schools across Australia collected soft bread plastics, which were converted into Polyrok (a 10% replacement for stone aggregate). This not only reduces the need to mine basalt but has also been locally trialled and demonstrated to reduce the heat of concrete by four degrees. Council also uses recycled soft plastics as bollards, signs and benches.

Council also uses crushed glass from bottles placed in recycling bins for road resurfacing. We used 222 tonnes of recycled glass for the access road to Hogan’s Pocket at Eton, which represented approximately a month’s worth of glass collected locally.

Our Waste and Recycling Strategy is due for review, and staff are currently developing a draft, with the aim to go out to the community later this year. This Strategy will underpin council’s actions for waste and resource recovery for the next five years and beyond. We will encourage the community to provide feedback once the draft is released later this year.

Finally, “Clean Up The Mackay Region” is happening from August 15 to 27. People can get involved to help clean up sites impacted by littering and illegal dumping. We encourage everyone to get involved at https://www.cleanup.org.au/mackay.

Councillor Belinda Hassan

Mackay Regional Council

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