By Luke Stewart, Stephanie Collins
Tagging. A word we associate with the scribble across our beautiful city. You know – graffiti. But I do not want to alarm you, bin tagging is no public stain… rather, it is an adornment for our ever faithful and waste guzzling bins.
Some members of our community will be asking… what is it? What is bin tagging?
Well, bin tagging is part of an ongoing effort to reduce the number of contaminants that are sent to our waste management and resource recovery sites. Even our State-leading Material Recovery Facility loses 17 percent of all recycling material that it’s sent.
Why? Some contaminants can be removed through hand and machine sorting, but this is a large undertaking that requires more time and resources than we can allocate to that task. Not only is that wasting resources, but it is also wasting our community’s money.
Whether the result of wish-cycling (I-hope-they-can-recycle-this-wishing), misinformation, or simple unknowing, a non-recyclable item mixed into your recyclables can cause havoc in the recycling process.
Soft plastics can mix with other materials, organic matter can soil recyclable materials, textiles can twist up in the recycling machines, and even batteries and hazardous household waste can cause fires to break out in the back of trucks and waste management sites.
That’s why it’s time for bin tagging to begin for 2024. You may find a tag on your recycling and FOGO bins with some feedback from your council. Community Waste Education Officers in their stylish hi-vis will be inspecting bins after they’ve been put out for collection. They will be collecting data on contaminants in bins and will let you know how your bins measure up through our tags.
So, what do I do if I see a bin tag on my bins? Well, If you find a tag on your bin, don’t panic. It’s a note from your friendly council. Check out the face on the tag to see how they found your bin. Information is provided on each tag to help you figure out where you can improve to Recycle Right.
A tag with a smiley face the same colour as the bin it was found on, means that you are doing A-OK! Your bin was full of all the right stuff and you did great. Good job! Well done! A tag with a grey sad face means that we found something in your bin that may contaminate the process of resource recovery. Check the note to see what you require to keep out of that bin the next time you dispose of your waste. This feedback is there to help you reflect on your recycling habits and learn how to be a better recycler. It also shows that we are in on this together; to be more sustainable; to save our community resources and wealth.
When your council bin tag your bins, you become part of a bigger plan for sustainability. The Waste Authority’s Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Strategy 2030 set out to reach 70% resource recovery by 2025 and 75% resource recovery by 2030. This means that by those dates, we hope to be able to recover 70% of all the waste sent to, and processed, in our resource recovery sites is being recovered and can be used again (and again and again).
