Page 1388 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 1 May 1990

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .


Mrs Grassby: The waste delivered.

MR DUBY: The waste delivered to the Ainslie Transfer Station. Mr Speaker, the actual answer to that is that approximately 240 tonnes of waste disposal is carted from the Ainslie tip per week, which I should point out amounts to a considerable cost to the ACT ratepayers. Also it might be worth pointing out, Mr Speaker, that well over half of that 240 tonnes of material which is deposited into the transfer bins to be carted away from Ainslie is in the nature of garden rubbish and generally compostable materials. Frankly, it is contrary to the Government's policy of encouraging people to compost their materials and thus participate in recycling.

As I said, 240 tonnes per week is carted away from the Ainslie Transfer Station. With regard to the amount of actual recyclable material which is recovered from the Ainslie Transfer Station, Mr Speaker, I do not have that information at hand. If you are talking about the number of kilos of aluminium, glass, et cetera, which may be deposited there, I just cannot give you that information off the top of my head. However, I can undertake to obtain that information for Mrs Grassby. It was a complicated and long question.

Mrs Grassby: The number of individual visits to the transfer station per week and the number of trips from the transfer station required to remove the waste per week?

MR DUBY: With regard to the number of individual visits per week, once again, Mr Speaker, to my knowledge, records are not kept of the number of personal trips that are made to the tip. What is interesting, of course, is the amount of actual waste that is carted away. I was quite amused to hear that last Thursday and Friday nights there was a traffic jam at the Ainslie tip as a number of people took advantage of the notification of the closure to rid themselves of unwanted material from around their properties.

With regard to the number of trips taken to move the stuff away, I am under the impression that it varies from day to day, depending on the amount of usage that the transfer station is receiving, but I believe it is in the order of 10 to 11 truckloads per day. That is my understanding, as I said. I would need to actually confirm those figures and I can perhaps get those for Mrs Grassby in full detail but I cannot give them off the top of my head.

Mrs Grassby: There is another part to the question - the proportion of recycling carried out there compared to the tips.

MR DUBY: Of course, Mr Speaker, the proportion of recycling that is carried on there at the Ainslie Transfer Station is significantly less than that which occurs, for


Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .