UPDATE – No such thing as rubbish!
by Anne Wharton
The recycling brochure No Such Thing As Rubbish has been updated. There are just a few small changes. To some extent, this reflects the fact that recycling practices for our yellow and green bins in Adelaide are slowly becoming more uniform and consistent across all council areas.
Many councils now supply kitchen compost bins and compostable liners for food scraps. If your council has this system and you don’t compost at home, all your food waste can go in your green bin. With the growing cost of landfill, most councils are trying to reduce the amount of rubbish going to landfill, and encourage residents to recycle in yellow and green bins as much as possible. It costs twice as much to send waste to landfill (red or blue bins) as it does to compost (green bins), and more than three times as much as recycling (yellow bins).
Our brochure also gives recycling options for lots of other items that can’t be recycled through council systems. One new item is Computers, working – this gives a couple of excellent options for re-using old computers. These are passed on to low-income people or refugees.
Please be encouraged to recycle all your soft plastic at Coles (or other supermarkets). Coles is part of the excellent program run by Replas in Victoria which turns all our soft plastic into products such as play equipment, outdoor furniture and fencing.
Another addition to the brochure is a note about the new St Peters Rotary Giant Shed Sale, open every Saturday morning at Linde Reserve, Stepney – a great place to take your unwanted but still useable goods.
The many layers in a tetra pak carton which makes it difficult to recycle.
The issues papers on the website on Electronic Waste and Plastics Recycling have also been updated. Look at the information on tetrapaks (Plastics Recycling) – milk and juice cartons, or tetra paks as they are sometimes called, are made of several layers of paper, aluminium and plastic and are difficult to recycle.
Please take care to recycle as much as possible so we can reduce landfill and also look after our precious environment.