A video of council workers in Sydney’s south-west mixing recycling and general rubbish in the same rubbish truck has sparked outrage among residents.
But the waste industry says there’s a simple reason it’s happening, with a simple solution, and that residents are partly to blame.
“The problem has been caused by local governments demanding unsafe working hours,” NSW Waste Contractors and Recyclers Association chief executive Tony Khoury told news.com.au.
“And the reason they require unsafe hours of operation is because they get trivial noise complaints from residents who don’t want pickup to be done when it’s safer, which is 2am, 3am and 4 in the morning, these are the safest times to pick up trash and recycling. from those streets.”
He said in many places “we are not allowed to start until after 7 in the morning”.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “Children go to school, people go on dates. It becomes a real safety issue for the driver, the runner behind the truck, members of the public.”
Earlwood mum Pia Coyle saw Canterbury-Bankstown Council rubbish workers emptying the contents of yellow recycling bins and red street rubbish bins into the same lorry and filmed video, which be published by The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday.
Ms Coyle told the newspaper that the council should have told residents if they could not empty the red and yellow bins separately, and that most people would have been willing to walk their bins the short distance to on the main road if it could be picked up by a bigger one. truck
“Recycling is very important to me and I want my kids to learn what to do,” she said.
Other neighbors also described witnessing the same thing.
“Why am I separating my recycling from my general waste when? [the collectors] Come and mix it all up again?” one resident wrote on social media alongside a photo of the same truck, the paper reported.
Another added that it had been “happening for years”.
Khoury told news.com.au the problem was that many areas of the city center with narrow lanes and roads could only be accessed with a rear-end forklift, which only collects one type of rubbish, unlike a side lift truck.
“Instead of sending two trucks and doubling the safety risk for workers and members of the public, the job is done with one truck,” he said.
“This is not a new thing, this has been constant [in some councils].”
Khoury, whose members own 95 per cent of the equipment used in the NSW waste industry, said if councils “gave as much safe time as possible, they could consider using a waste truck and another for recycling.”
“But then the City has to handle the noise complaints,” he said.
“I’m a bit on that: Our industry doesn’t create garbage. We’re there to collect it and transport it, but we have to do it as safely as possible. You’ve been asked to do a job, but then you have hand tied behind his back.”
Ideally, he said, all waste and recycling collection “should be allowed at the safest possible time” determined by a risk assessment, not for the City to set arbitrary times based on noise complaints .
He noted that in 2018, a grandmother died after being hit by a garbage truck on Sydney’s northern beaches.
“We’re talking about serious real-life mortality implications if we get it wrong,” he said.
There are around 18,000 full-time, part-time and casual workers in the NSW waste industry.
Canterbury-Bankstown Mayor Khal Asfour told news.com.au in a statement that he shared the frustrations of some residents and had called for a full review of the council’s waste operations.
“Absolutely, this is an issue I take very seriously,” he said.
“That is why I have asked council staff to carry out a full review of our waste operations. But I want to emphasize that this does not happen in the whole city, but in a handful of streets that are difficult to access. This is about public safety and our larger trucks accessing narrow streets with cars parked on either side.”
Mayor Asfour added that when City Council became aware of the issues, staff worked with the community to address them.
“In some cases, residents asked the council not to install parking signs so trucks could have proper access, and in other cases, residents wheeled bins to the end of their street “, he said.
“Obviously there are still some problem locations and if the review means changes need to be made I will move heaven and earth to fix that.”
However, other councils dealing with narrow streets, including Inner West Council and Waverley Council, said The Sydney Morning Herald they didn’t have the same truck size problem and they didn’t mix trash with recycling.
Suzanne Toumbourou, chief executive of the Australian Recycling Council, said she would describe the video as “atypical behaviour” and that “I imagine knowing the councils I work with, they would be horrified by this approach.”
“They would probably also be horrified at what this could mean in terms of the confidence with which households engage in their recycling systems,” he said.
“I certainly hope it doesn’t inform the community’s expectations. From a recycling perspective, that’s the last thing the industry wants to see.”
In 2017, a major Chinese ban on importing waste from other countries, allegedly for “recycling”, put the local industry in crisis as almost half of Australia’s metal, plastic, paper and cardboard had been sent there.
Ms Toumbourou said Australian recycling technology had “come a long way, especially over the last few years – we’ve become strong recyclers”.
“We need to support the community’s confidence in the outcomes of recycling,” he said.
frank.chung@news.com.au
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