THIS year National Recycling Week will be celebrated from November 12-18.
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Originally founded by Planet Ark in 1996, National Recycling Week is now in its 17th year . The aim of the week is to bring a national focus to the environmental benefits of recycling.
National Recycling Week is that time of the year when we celebrate the success of our recycling programs within the central west and remind everyone why recycling is important.
It is not that long ago that it all went to the good old “tip” or “dump” which is really just another name of a big hole in the ground where rubbish was buried.
Those days are gone. Modern landfills are designed and engineered to receive waste. However, continuing to dispose of untreated waste in landfills is not the best long-term option.
The Orange “tip” was opened during the 1960's and council took over management of the site in 1994. In keeping with a change in attitude towards “rubbish,” it eventually became known as the Orange Resource Recovery Centre .
In support of this different approach to waste management a kerbside recycling service was introduced in 1995.
Since then we have been recycling more and more, and there are some great outcomes to be achieved. Recycling one tonne of paper and cardboard saves 13 trees. Making glass from recycled material requires only 40 per cent of the energy used to make glass from sand and every tonne of steel made from scrap steel saves 1131kg of iron ore, 54 kg of limestone and 633 kg of coal.
To celebrate National Recycling Week Orange City Council will have supplements in the Central Western Daily on Wednesday, November 14, and the Midstate Observer on Thursday, November 15, informing the community on what council is doing for recycling and reminding us what we can and cannot recycle.
Orange City Council, as part of its recycling program will be implementing its new food and garden organics collection commencing 2013. In the meantime it is busy constructing all the associated infrastructure for the Orange Waste Project.
Sue Clarke, environmental learning adviser for Netwaste, congratulates the local government areas of Orange, Blayney, Cabonne, Forbes and Parkes which are part of a joint recycling project , together sending approximately 69 tonnes of recycling to the Orange Materials Recycling Facility every week. That is a great effort.
In her role as environmental learning advisor with Netwaste Sue will be spending National Recycling Week with students at schools within the five council areas. With support from JR Richards she will be having lots of fun spreading the reduce, reuse, recycle message.
Sue says that recycling is important but it is only one of the ways that we can reduce waste going to landfill. Don't forget to buy recycled. There are lots of products made from recycled materials.
It doesn't seem to make much sense to be going to the trouble of separating our recyclable materials and putting them into our recycle bins if we don't consider buying some of it back and completing the recycling loop.
There are lots of things in our local stores made from recycled materials. Read the labels and you may be surprised what you find.