Australia has been described as being a high producer of waste when compared to other countries. Between 33 -74 % of the waste produced is diverted from landfill for other uses including recycling. ACT, SA and Victoria divert the highest proportion of waste, up to 74 %. NSW, QLD and WA divert the least, as little as 33 % DEWHA 2008.
Some people are keen recyclers and have set up systems in their home to separate out their waste. On the other hand others aren’t really sure what to recycle, or find it too difficult or time consuming to do.
There are some simple rules to remember to become a top grade recycler, follow these are you can’t go wrong:
- If you don’t have them already contact your local council to find out materials they collect for recycling and obtain the bins or boxes provided to separate out the waste.
- Don’t place recyclables in plastic bags – staff at recycling centres will not open plastic bags no matter what the contents are, so the bag and its contents will end up in landfill.
- Take the tops off bottles and empty them to prevent liquid spilling and ruining other recyclable products or damaging equipment at the recycling centre.
- Don’t place broken glasses, plates, mugs, ovenproof glass or ceramics in the recycling container as these cannot be recycled and will contaminate normal glass making it useless for recycling.
- Metal lids from jars and bottles can be recycled through metal recycling.
- Tin cans can be recycled – rinse them in your washing up water to get rid of food contamination. They don’t need to be spotless, but getting rid of food will reduce odour.
- Empty cartons such as juice and milk containers can be recycled, again rinse if you can to reduce odour.
- Recycle newspapers, remove plastic bags from unread newspapers and mags before recycling.
- Plastic bags, crockery, polystyrene, syringes, nappies etc can’t be recycled, put these in the general waste.
- Food scraps can’t be recycled, get rid of them in a worm farm or bokashi bin.
Recycling programs also exist or mobile phones, batteries, paints, white goods, printer cartridges, computers, corks, you name it. To find out where you can recycle these visit Recycling Near You.
For more information on waste and recycling visit our waste essentials article or visit the following:
Recycling Goods – the recycling website designed to keep useful items out of landfills and general information on how to recycle waste from your household or organisation.
Visy – explains the typical recycling process at the waste facility.
Freecycle – give away or get items to prevent them going to landfill at this Australian recycling community website.
Some recycling facts:
Once an aluminium can is recycled its back on the grocery shelf as a new can within 60 days
Every ton of paper recycled saves 2.5 barrels of oil, 4,100 kWh of electricity, 4 cubic metres of water and 31,780 litres of water.
Glass takes one million years to break down naturally but can be recycled forever to the same product quality every time.
Manufacturing plastics from recycled materials uses 30 per cent of the energy required to make plastic products from fossil fuels.
Recycling steel cans saves 87 per cent of the energy it takes to make the cans from raw materials
