Page 652 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 1990
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parliament, following the committee's report, to provide the means to do so. We must introduce the systems that will enable the ACT to become the model for Australia.
I compliment Dr Kinloch and Mr Stefaniak, who came to the committee late. They worked very hard to try to catch up with the concepts that we had acquired over quite a long time. I regret that they came in so late that they missed that educative process and did not grasp the great number of concepts about which we had learned earlier. I have appreciated working with them. I believe now that perhaps we should have backtracked and done it all again. If that had been the case, it might have taken another nine months, but we would have had the report that the first committee would have introduced. If Mr Moore had stayed on the committee we would have had a majority report the other way. I do not want to create dissent on the other side, but I am sure that if Mr Humphries and Ms Maher had stayed with the committee, if other events had not intervened, they would have come down the path of recycling. I know that from the conversations that we had as we moved around.
The report is primarily about recycling. I regret that good recommendations in the report are negated by that one major item concerning big bins, and as such the report is substantially rendered ineffective. The total collection concept, with big bins of 240 litres, simply does not match up with recycling. Big bins do not go with recycling. The people who argued that they do were predominantly those people who sold the big bins. The conservation groups told us that we should not have big bins. It was my experience, as I moved around, that the weight of evidence was that the big bins, of 240 litres or greater, could not be used with recycling.
We have to separate material at source to encourage recycling, yet the whole concept of big bins is to lump everything into them. Mr Stefaniak, we do not want to put garden waste into big bins. It is not the place for it. We learnt in Sydney that they can turn engine sumps or whole engine blocks, oil and all sorts of things out of those big bins. They are much bigger and more solid, and they can take a great deal more. That is not what we want.
The advantage of the 120-litre bin is that, collected weekly, it introduces a shortfall, as Mr Stefaniak pointed out, and that is what we wanted. We want people to find that there is not enough space in their bins so that they are required to adopt other measures to dispose of that surplus waste. For that reason, a 120-litre bin is acceptable. We do not want the big bin into which people will dump everything. We have to aim to reduce the volume of waste going to the landfill. That landfill, Mr Stefaniak, is expensive, and it is in short supply in this city. We must diminish the flow of waste to it. Big bins simply will not do that. I have to dispute Mr Stefaniak's figures about the cost of big bins. His figures, I think, zeroed out. It is at least $80 per household, a much more expensive system.
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