The NSW Government has shifted the emphasis towards increased waste recovery. The new provisions replace the previous limited requirement to consider whether a proposal had demonstrated there was “justifiable demand” for the facility.

The step is a lighter version than South Australia’s waste policy, which will mandate some level of waste processing before the residual can be land filled.

Personally I feel we have a real to work towards both less waste and less impact of waste in our landfills. With an increasing population and increasing consumption in industrialised countries the amount we waste is really scandalous if people stopped and thought about it.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Following up on my local council’s very offhand approach to CFL globes and eWaste, I called my local Council again and finally spoke their environment officer.

Her viewpoint was that it is up to people when they buy goods to work out how they are going to dispose of them.

That is difficult for the compact fluoro light globes that the Government is mandating the use of without and warning about their disposal or any organisation to cope with this.   99% will end up in landfil and release their mercury to the water table.  Will this Government ever do any job properly and see the consequences sorted?

I think it is also an issue for other things like eWaste.  I certainly did not consider the disposal problem 17 years ago when I bought my now intermittent TV.  And unless some regulatory body imposes this disclosure onto retailers the situation will remain and the problem will grow as I doubt if all the nice flat plasma and LCD screens will last 17 years.

If councils are going to collect waste, they need realise that unless they make provision for collecting the fluorescent s and eWaste that should not go to landfill, that is precisely where they will end up!

The alternative is to be like many European countries where councils do not collect any household waste but provide facilities for people to carry and sort their waste into appropriate bins that are located in every neighbourhood and also provide “whole of life” restrictions on sales so that “dead” equipment goes back to the shop, and back to the producer or importer.

This scenario does reduce waste because people do think about buying things where they need to carry their waste and sort it themselves.

Meantime, until they bite that bullet, councils have a responsibility to manage fluoros and eWaste effectively in neighbourhoods and to start the proves of educating the public.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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The plastic vortex of the Northern Pacific is where much of the non-biodegradable rubbish from everyday life ends up.  This is a giant floating rubbish patch in the North Pacific twice the size of the US state of Texas and four times the size of Japan.

The patch includes non-biodegradable plastics, chemical sludge and other debris including fishing nets that has been trapped by the currents.

What worries researchers most is the impact the plastic dump is having on marine life.

When a sperm whale in California washed up six months ago, they opened its stomach and it had 400 kilos of plastic and netting inside.

And there is some evidence that the plastic is raining down from the vortex onto the ocean floor.  And there is no way to know what might be on the bottom.

Roughly 70 per cent of all the debris that goes to into the ocean sinks… and the impact is potentially great on marine life.

The plastic vortex is an international problem and the responsibility of all nations.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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At last some common sense!  Not too common that…..we have mountains of waste going to landfill plus solid waste days now some NSW councils are holding mass garage sales to encourage people to swap their unwanted goods rather than dump them in tips that are fast running out of space.

Faced with a total rubbish tax of more than $222 million a year, cash-strapped councils want people to barter and share.

A mass giveaway will be held at Blacktown Showground during its art and music Burbs Festival, where hundreds of people will swap clothes, shoes, books and oddities on April 17.

In the Hunter region, more than $8000 in prizemoney is being offered by a group of eight councils to get people to turn rubbish into sculptures to go on display at Maitland Town Hall and Raymond Terrace art galleries.

Giant neighbourhood garage sales with up to 50 householders opening roller doors are being held across Sydney.  Leichhardt, Hornsby, Manly and Ryde councils run ‘Second Hand Saturdays’, giving registered households free ads online and in suburban newspapers.

In Adelaide we have “Solid Waste Days” and I had not idea of the import until one Sunday morning I was going for a walk, thinking there was more that usual traffic, when one solid waste pile I went past had a small toddlers toy plastic “motorbike” so I stopped, looked and picked it up thinking it was perfect for my one year old grandson.  Much too good for the tip.

Well I understood the traffic after that.  All the way home, carrying my plastic bike, I had people hanging out of car windows shouting at me that “you’ve done well love” so I started to look at the solid waste – a lot was perfectly good furniture and toys that the cars and trailers were collecting.  Well over half the solid waste in the streets near where I lived disappeared before the truck came on Monday.  If they can increase that percentage so much the better.

Oh by the way, my one year old grandson is now six and his two year old brother is still enjoying his “motor bike” whenever he comes to Gran’s house.

Finding new homes for goods simply makes sense.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Waste management experts in South East Queensland warn that we need a cultural and legislative shift toward more recycling before billions of tonnes of garbage costing millions of dollars swamp the area as waste is growing even faster than population.

Some SEQ councils predict annual rate rises to cover waste disposal and government levies are being floated as 4.4 million people are expected in the southeast by 2030.  This could mean 1.6 billion tonnes per year plus a further three million tonnes of rubbish a year is expected from industrial, construction and demolition waste.

The average Queenslander generates 374kg of household waste a year, plus 134kg of green waste and 102kg of biosolids.

Landfill sites are filling fast!  The question is should ratepayers pay for all the costs when this also a major tourism playground

Everyone needs to understand that with a growing community there will be growing generation of waste, regardless of how much recycling, and we need a fundamental cultural change in the same way people have discussed water and water restrictions.

Local Government Association of Queensland executive director Greg Hallam said that local governments would have to work together on a regional basis to tackle the issue of waste management, as they now do with water.

Alternative technology, such as using waste to create energy is being considered and the SEQ Council of Mayors is developing a waste management strategy while a new state government waste plan is expected later this year.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Waste produced in Adelaide will be banned from landfill from September 2012 unless it is first subjected to resource recovery “in accordance with the waste management hierarchy and to the extent reasonably achievable”.

It must be processed “at an appropriate licensed material recovery facility or composting depot” or some other EPA-approved facility.

Councils with three-bin collection services will, however, still be able to dump their residual waste material.

Industry has a two-year reprieve

Some specific materials will be exempt from the requirement, including hazardous waste, medical waste, quarantine waste and wastewater.

Banned from landfill disposal altogether is hazardous and medical waste, lead acid batteries and whole tyres.

Also banned are materials that have been “aggregated for resource recovery,” including glass, cardboard and paper, organics, a range of metals and PET or HDPE plastic packaging.

Other materials to be progressively banned over the next 2-3 years, include mercury-containing fluorescent light tubes, computers and TVs, white goods and other electronic wastes.

It will be interesting to know what people are suposed to do with fluoro light globes because I bet most households will be much too confused to dispose of them properly unless there is a publicity campaign and easy disposal.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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There is an ever growing “mountain” of e-waste with western countries exporting the problem to third world countries.  80 per cent of devices like computers and televisions imported to Nigeria, Pakistan and Ghana classified for reuse are simply scrapped – they are nothing more than waste.

According to a UN Environment Program report, between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of obsolete electronic goods collected for recycling in the US each year is being exported.

Even China which produces 2.3 million tonnes of its own domestic e-waste a year and has banned e-waste imports, still finds it is a dumping ground for the world’s e-waste.

There does need to be international agreement to prevent this exporting of obsolete electronic equipment needs to be recycled to yield valuable materials, such as precious metals and not simply incinerated to recover metals, which emits heavy metals and toxic chemicals including dioxins, which is often the case in third world countries.

Otherwise these waste exporters are simply exploiting a loophole in the Basel Convention which is supposed to prevent rich countries from sending their toxic waste to poor countries.
In Australia, environment ministers are planning a national e-waste scheme for November this year.  Environment and industry groups say they will support a scheme that would legally require all companies importing televisions and computers into the country to recycle them at the end of the products’ life.

This scheme proposes a financial incentive to companies to make computers more easily upgradeable, less disposable and at the very least, easier to recycle.
T
his recycling responsibility is nothing new!  It has been the norm in countries like Germany for many years so we are only doing catch up.  Green design only comes when the company that produces the product has to deal with the waste phase.

In Australia we are about to have a real spike in waste TVs are the analogue signal is turned off and everyone rushes out to buy the new energy hungry flat screen TVs.  It would be good to see the waste addressed at source with longer lasting, more energy efficient equipment designed to be easily recycled.

Green design only comes when the company that makes a product also deals with the waste phase.  Exporting waste is not acceptable.  E-waste is a serious problem

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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The South Australian EPA is looking at standards for capturing energy from waste or Refuse Derived Fuel.  The standard has been through an extensive consultation phase.  They want to be sure that this is effectively managed.

They are also looking at waste recovery or in their words Waste to Resource issues.

This has got to be addressed.  We generate enormous tonnages of waste  and the main word is actually WASTE.  What we are tossing is made from the resources that we are so busy digging up and chopping down at an ever increasing rate.  This is all part of both environmental management and good energy management.

One really interesting article I read was about the number of mattresses we toss out each year. On the Sunshine Coast in Queensland 18,000 mattresses go to landfill each year.  These are mainly organic material that will emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

There are some opportunities for recycling mattresses.  Some can be reconditioned and carefully cleaned for distribution to charity organisations and a number of resources can be recovered for re-use in industry such as wood and coconut fibres, latex, wadding and foam, metal springs and some fabrics.

These are all examples of the things we need to take into account when we buy, use and dispose of all the STUFF we consume if we are to achieve environmental sustainability.

This is what needs to be addressed when we reduce our carbon footprint both at home and at work  and also when we do it properly in our businesses with environmental management systems.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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I took 30 mins while I ate my lunch and I watched Oprah.   She was discussing earth Day and had a variety of guests.  None was new to me but it was very graphic and great exposure to a hidden problem

For centuries man has washed his waste down the rivers into the sea.  Ships toss their garbage into the sea.  Now every ocean has a central gyre which is effectively a giant rubbish dump.  This is all types of waste but it had huge amounts of household waste.

In the centre of the Pacific Ocean there is a floating rubbish dump that is larger in area than Texas and in places it is 90 metres deep.  The majority of the floating debris is plastic – bags, bottles, cigarette lighters etc.  Huge quantities of plastic bags.   The seabed had the heavier waste.

In Adelaide where I live the government has banned the use of plastic shopping bags which I think is a great idea.  I use fabric shopping bags anyway and have done for years.

The show went on to show the tons of waste going to landfill daily and the largest problem was paper.  This is one of the organic materials that break down to in landfill giving off methane emissions.

One thing I really liked was the US concept of a recycle bank where people get credits than can be used like cash for their recycled materials.  We don’t get that here although we do have deposits on all beverage containers and have done for many years with the noticabale result that beverage containers are not found as litter.  They are all collected and cashed in.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Emissions from legacy waste are not included in the Australian Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, but it still needs to be managed and preferably harnessed.

The Waste Management Association of Australia’s president Dr Ron Wainberg said that while it was good emissions from legacy waste has been excluded from the government’s scheme because it would have been “unfair” to make the sector pay for “sins of the past” – “There now needs to be some sort of incentive to capture those [legacy waste] emissions, otherwise you ruin the integrity of the whole idea of Australia having a carbon trading scheme to reduce our emissions.

At present only about 26% of the landfill gas is captured across the country.  Tony Wright, a partner in Wright Corporate Strategy, said it was “ridiculous” that there isn’t already some kind of mandatory gas capture initiative in place.  And he went on to say that “We should also look at closing down all those little unattended landfills” across the country.
This gas capture is also a matter of public safety.  Paper and organics have to come out of landfills.  We should be aiming to prevent the generation of methane in landfills, not merely capturing it.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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