Changing the way we think about garbage

Once the garbage truck drives off it is time for residents to stop putting everything except recyclables in their red bins and begin thinking of garbage as only those waste products that cannot be either recycled or composted.

Items such as nappies, non-recyclable packaging, honey containers (to protect the honey industry around Euchareena), tissues, plastic bags and ceramics should be put in the red bin while all vegetable, meat and other organic kitchen waste should join lawn clippings and garden waste in the weekly green bin.

That leaves just bottles, cans, glass, newspaper and other recyclables for the fortnightly yellow bin.

For households that already have compost containers in the kitchen and a compost bin and perhaps a worm farm in the backyard, separating organic waste will be nothing new. For others it is a little like back to the future - a return to the days before plastic grocery bags and kitchen tidy liners when kitchen scraps were wrapped in newspaper and there was less packaging in general.

The reason for this latest change to garbage services is the cost of processing the waste we generate and the growing volume of landfill we produce.

Councils around the country are being forced to reduce the amount of garbage consigned to landfill and the only way to do that is to recycle and compost as much as possible.

The council’s decision to begin charging a levy for the green waste service before it began got some residents off-side, but the change was inevitable and should be followed soon by another.

The council should investigate reducing the size of the red “landfill” bin. With a weekly collection of green garden waste and organic household waste most people should not need the large red bin, which too often in the past has swallowed up all manner of organic waste which could have been composted for reuse.