Recycling

By Mike Ritchie – Director, MRA Consulting Group Plastic pollution of waterways and oceans is a real problem. We need to fix it. Plastic was only invented 100 years ago and now is ubiquitous in our economies and lifestyles. It is also ubiquitous in our pollution. From microbeads to plastic bottles and fish nets plastic […]

The Albury Wodonga region is the best in both NSW and Victoria for household recycling. That’s according to a recent audit of kerbside household waste, which shows that total diversion rates of the four councils that introduced a combined food and garden organics service this year was 82% on average. The councils that achieved this […]

The rollout of new food and garden (FOGO) waste collection systems is stressful for many councils. MyWaste shows it does not need to be. For many residents, wheeling out and collecting their bins each week represents their most significant interaction with Council. This is a learned behaviour established over many years. Subsequently, changes to collection […]

MRA has wrapped up its 2014-2015 ‘Bin Trim Business Grants’ project, which is part of the NSW Government Waste Less Recycle More $465.7 million program. Along with 26 other Bin Trim providers, we have visited 8,000+ small to medium enterprises (SME) across NSW. SMEs are responsible for 45 per cent of commercial and industrial (C&I) […]

A recent case in the NSW Land and Environment Court has highlighted the discord between NSW’s planning laws and the environmental protection laws, which could impact the way that waste and recycling processers are approved and regulated. After much advocacy by the waste and recycling sectors, the Government in 2007 introduced the State Environmental Planning […]

With your help, we’ve been working hard to recover valuable resources in the Murray Murrumbidgee region. As the year comes to a close, we’d like to highlight some of the network’s recent developments. Albury Workshop A successful workshop with over 40 attendees was held in Albury on August 25th. From this workshop MRA identified three […]

The most cost effective way to recover food and green waste, which account for more than 60% of an average household’s garbage bin, is via a three bin system with food and green waste (FOGO) in the same bin… but should nappy waste be included the mix? About 15 councils across Australia currently run FOGO […]

Australians are the best household recyclers in the world. Our domestic kerbside recycling rates are second to none. But even so, we still put about 15-30% of all recyclables into the wrong bin. That is, into the garbage bin instead of the recycling bin. By Mike Ritchie. In NSW, this loss of recyclables accounts for […]

The first round of Waste Less Recycle More infrastructure grants came to a close in early March, with consultants and applicants alike breathing a sigh of relief as schedules, cost benefit analyses and application forms were submitted to the Environmental Trust for appraisal. The opportunities promised by the WLRM package are immense. Traditional waste service […]

In 2012, in an article published in the WME online blog, MRA wrote: “Here we are at the end of a 6-year negotiation that began with the CPRS and NGERS and has finished with the Carbon Pricing Mechanism (CPM) and the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI)”. We all thought this was the end of the theoretical […]

The government’s announcement of a carbon price plan might well lead to a rise in recycling rates for high embodied energy materials such as aluminium and plastics, but could also bring challenges such as increased operating costs. While the industry awaits further details from the government, industry consultant Mike Ritchie said the carbon plan is the right reform but that waste and recycling remain the […]

Every waste conference has a stream for waste education. But in the fastest growing generator – commercial and Industrial (C&I) – does it produce any results? By results I refer to real reductions in waste to landfill measured in hundreds of thousands of tonnes – the scale on which other initiatives such as landfill pricing, […]