And, the grim message from the Canterbury Bankstown Mayor was: “We are drowning in waste … and unless governments at all levels, industry leaders and manufacturers begin to seriously tackle this issue, we will be left sitting on a pile of waste.
“That’s not an exaggeration, it’s a reality with more than half of Sydney’s household and commercial waste going to landfill.
“Unless we take urgent action, in the next decade the red bin waste will have nowhere to go.
“There is no clear plan for the future … and that should be of most concern.”
He said more needed to be done to educate and support communities to reduce waste.
He called for the NSW Government to invest the revenue collected from the waste levy into building the waste infrastructure needed to meet the waste pressures and the Federal Government to expedite bans on materials that cannot be recycled or recovered in Australia.
He will also encourage discussions with other councils to reduce waste, improve environmental outcomes where waste has to be processed, influence policies and markets by planning, procuring and advocating together, and finding solutions for the residue that is left.
He said that with more and more waste, landfill sites reaching capacity and an increase in the Waste Levy, valuable resources which could be recycled were going into landfill.
In July, the council’s wast levy per tonne was increased to $163.20 – adding an extra $1.16 million to their waste bill.
“And that in turn is passed onto our ratepayers … revenue which goes to the State Government and not pumped back into solving the waste crisis,” the Mayor said.
