Page 1744 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 June 2022
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roughly accounts for 93 per cent of textile waste generated each year. We should do more to reduce this number, and the ACT government is ready to partner with the community in a variety of different ways.
The ACT government is supporting a charity bin trial at the Hume Resource Management Centre. The trial is helping us to redirect textiles from unnecessarily going into landfill and allows the ACT government to also support charity partners—Koomarri, in this instance, an organisation based in the ACT and southern New South Wales that seeks to support people living with a disability to have high quality jobs. Koomarri runs a social enterprise called Cut Cloth, which turns waste textiles that are not fit for sale into rags—literally a rag trade—and they are then sold to businesses in the local region.
The ACT government is very proud to partner with Koomarri to deliver this important social enterprise and initiative. For the first seven full months of the trial, from 1 November 2021 until 31 May 2022, a total of 118.4 tonnes of material has been recovered for re-use. This represents an average of approximately 16.9 tonnes per month.
Canberrans can drop off old clothes to this charity bin at the Hume Resource Management Centre, or at the Green Shed at Mitchell, where the Green Shed are also supporting this social initiative. I look forward to seeing the trial continue through to October this year, when the ACT government will evaluate and assess its success before looking to make this a permanent initiative. Of course, we will also be informed around the next steps coming from the development of a draft circular economy strategy, in consultation with the community.
The charity bin pilot came from a change in government policy, with the removal of charity bins from public land. There are a range of different charity bins still available on private land to which people can drop off clothing and textiles, but there was a concern in the community around illegal dumping. We are looking forward to moving on to the next steps following this trial—looking at how we can potentially expand the drop-off points while making sure that, as we do so, it also reduces the risk of illegal dumping, which was costing charities millions of dollars to clean up.
It is encouraging to see that Canberrans are enthusiastically engaging with initiatives that promote the re-use of products, including clothing and textiles. Examples supported by the ACT government include the Garage Sale Trail, a national community and sustainability event where communities across the country hold garage sales on the same weekend. The key goal of that event is to promote the re-use and redistribution of second-hand items. That has also had a focus in recent years on using clothing and textiles to create new clothes and sell those on to the community. The Zero Waste Festival, which I attended in April, also included a clothes swap to support Canberrans to update their wardrobes. It is great to see that events like this are occurring around the city and drawing the attention of the community to the fantastic re-use opportunities with clothing and used clothing.
Beyond this, Canberrans are actively engaging in buying, selling and gifting items online, on platforms like Facebook, “buy nothing” groups and online marketplaces.
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