Media release – Australian Council of Recycling (ACOR), 28 July 2022
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON SORTING: COUNCIL’S KERBSIDE CONDUCT NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF RECYCLING ACROSS AUSTRALIA
The Australian Council of Recycling (ACOR) is deeply concerned by today’s reports that a council in NSW has been mixing some households’ recycling and rubbish for over a decade.
As the peak body for resource recovery, recycling and remanufacturing in Australia, ACOR and its members work hard to educate and empower the Australian community to ‘recycle right’ and divert these recoverable resources from landfill.
“Thankfully, it is not a common practice at all to mix recycling with general waste at collection. These kinds of practices undermine our community’s confidence in recycling and send all the wrong messages to householders trying to do the right thing,” said ACOR CEO Suzanne Toumbourou.
“Australian recyclers have come such a long way over the last few years, with improvements to environmental, health and safety approaches, as well as great advances in technology and investment to recycle here in Australia. We can be confident that across the country, industry is working with local governments to genuinely deliver sustainable recycling outcomes from kerbside collection,” she said.
One such initiative launched by ACOR last year is the recycling education app Recycle Mate. The Recycle Mate app was designed to boost confidence in recycling and remove the guesswork, no matter where you are in Australia. This free app has been designed with cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to produce Australia’s most comprehensive recycling database – right at your fingertips.
Covering all areas of Australia, Recycle Mate provides information on every council’s kerbside recycling system. For those times when an item legitimately can’t be recycled at home through your kerbside bins, the app now has over 20,000 away-from-home reuse and recycling options.
“Through the Recycle Mate app, we are inviting every local council, every recycler and the Australian community to join the conversation about recycling. We are working to understand the different systems in different areas and find out what the community wants to know about recycling so that we can bring them the truth across all geographies,” said Ms Toumbourou.
“Recycling still remains the number one activity we can all do everyday to really make a difference for our environment. Our recycling industry is strong, and it relies on our community doing their very best to help us recover great quality materials,” said Ms Toumbourou.
“Today’s story does not reflect what really happens across 99% of our recycling industry – this story is more about concerning outlier behaviour. We very much look forward to continuing to work with councils across Australia to achieve unprecedented progress as a circular economy. We need to keep confidence strong in our communities because we are recycling in Australia and we need to do it right!”
