Page 572 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 22 February 2012
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in the ACT and options to address these. To both inform the community and elicit feedback on these options, five community forums, an industry forum and a specific energy-from-waste forum were held during February 2011.
The Greens MLAs and their advisers attended two of these forums and my directorate has provided them with three briefings on the waste strategy, along with the potential strengths and weaknesses of an organic waste collection service and a residual waste material recovery facility, or a residual MRF. I am therefore surprised that Ms Le Couteur and her Greens colleagues continue to push for ineffective and inefficient proposals such as the so-called third bin.
Ms Le Couteur asserts that the Mugga Lane landfill site is expected to be full in 2015. This is merely part of the story about the management of landfill needs in the territory. Nonetheless, none of the proposals put forward in this motion, such as education or a third bin, would address the problem, even if it were the case that the whole Mugga landfill were to be full in that time.
The fact is that only the current cell of the Mugga Lane landfill is expected to be at capacity by 2015. The government has been aware of this situation and its impacts on the community and has made statements about its plans for new cells adjacent to the existing area. These arrangements are well advanced and will ensure the continuous provision of a safe, secure landfill capacity for the ACT potentially out to 2080.
The government commissioned Hyder to produce a report, Assessment of waste infrastructure and services options for the ACT, which was released in December 2011. However, the conclusions the report presents are not reflected in the Greens’ motion today. Instead, the Greens have cherry-picked the Hyder report in an attempt to support their preconceived positions on this matter.
What this motion fails to recognise is that the territory’s waste strategies have already reduced waste to landfill from nearly 60 per cent to below 30 per cent of total waste since 2003-04 and in 2010-11 we reached a low of 25 per cent. The use of a residual waste MRF would deal with the remaining green waste from our households and our urban forests. The motion also fails to recognise that with the existing resource recovery rates in the nation, the ACT’s waste management strategy contains the most ambitious targets of any jurisdiction for resource recovery into the future, including the achievement of carbon neutrality for our waste sector.
I would like to turn to the issue of a third bin and the reasons it is not supported by this government. The evidence is clear that a third bin option simply is not a cost-effective solution. The evidence is that they do not result in the levels of resource recovery that we can expect from a modern waste management system, and comparisons with other cities ignore the high recovery rates and overall better waste management already achieved by the ACT.
For example, Penrith City Council introduced a third bin for organic waste and found that it resulted in very high levels of contamination, while producing a low value compost. Hyder shows that a residual MRF would have much higher rates of useful resource recovery. Furthermore, Hyder suggests that household-based waste
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