Rethink your Rubbish

Poem

'I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you.

You don’t know how to fix the holes in the ozone layer.
You don't know how to bring the salmon back up a dead stream.
You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
And you can’t bring back the forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.

You grown ups say you love us. I challenge you. Please make your actions reflect your words.’

12 year old Severn Cullis-Suzuki (Canada)
United Nations Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, June 1992

It’s time for the Redlands to rethink our rubbish!

Recycling right at home begins long before you take your rubbish out to the kerbside for collection. Most of us sort our recycling from waste in the kitchen of our homes, so it’s worth investing in some user-friendly bins that allow you to transport your waste and recycling easily and separately to your individual bins. That way, the sorting is already done by the time you get to the bins.

A quick look at our bins

Of the 7,500 truckloads full of rubbish households produced last year, 19% isn’t actually rubbish at all. It’s recyclables! That’s equivalent ot 7,600 tonnes of recycling, or 950 truck loads, of recycling going straight to landfill
Of the 1,600 truckloads of recyclables produced by households last year, 12% was contaminated. That’s over 1,600 tonnes, or over 200 truckloads of rubbish choking our recycling facility every year. This contamination can damage the machinery, and reduce the efficiency of the sorting operations. In short contamination can undo a lot of our hard work

Our target for 2011
Our target this year will be to get our recycling right. If we can all recycle right, we can increase our resource recovery of recyclables by over 12 per cent in the Redlands, which is equivalent to 950 truckloads. This saves precious resources from being sourced from the natural environment.

However, this is just our first step to help reduce our waste and increase our resource recovery. With a new draft state government waste strategy in place, we can expect to see some changes in the way we think about our rubbish.

Council target: Redland City Council must increase its recovery of resources in the community from 32 % to 65% (based draft state government waste strategy guidelines)
Redland school targets: All Queensland schools must reduce waste output by 50% over the next three years.