Rubbish & recycling

Rubbish is a growing issue for our region, for a number of reasons.

We're running out of places to put it

The rubbish created in our region every year would fill the Westpac Stadium twice over.

Currently, all that rubbish gets buried in landfills, but even now we don't have enough of them.

Finding suitable locations for new ones in future will be hard, and no-one wants to have one next door.

It takes centuries to break down

Once it gets to a landfill, plastic, steel, aluminium and even paper takes hundreds of years to break down.

Garden waste and kitchen scraps break down into methane, a flammable greenhouse gas.

Green waste also combines with water to form a poison called leachate that can contaminate groundwater. Leachate has to be collected and treated which is very expensive.

The problem won't go away

We can't keep burying rubbish and just hoping the problem will go away. It won't. Reducing, recycling, reusing and composting are the keys, and the more you do, the bigger the difference you can make.

Make a difference - by 65%!

Simply by spending a little more time on sorting your rubbish and composting, you can reduce the rubbish you throw out by 65% - nearly two-thirds. That's really making a difference!