Page 576 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 22 February 2012
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(ii) the recovery of additional household organics with a MRF will produce safe and valuable compost; and
(iii) recovery of household organics with garden wastes in a third bin risks contaminating the green waste and undermining the existing, highly effective, garden waste collection system;”.
(4) Omit paragraph (2), substitute:
“(2) further notes:
(a) Hyder concluded that the MRF was the best environmental choice;
(b) that the education scenario and the MRF were not mutually exclusive;
(c) that the Government’s waste strategy supports both education and new cost efficient and effective waste infrastructure;
(d) Hyder shows that the MRF scenario performs best in terms of overall GHG emissions;
(e) the report also shows the most expensive overall options considered are the Garden 3rd bin scenario and the Organic 3rd bin scenario; and
(f) Hyder shows that these would collect less than half of household organics at nearly twice the cost of a MRF which would collect more than 80%.”.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (11.04): The issue of waste is one that should be central to a local jurisdiction. Everywhere else in the country there are councils which deal with this kind of problem on a daily basis. Here in the ACT it is, of course, the ACT government which delivers this service or, in some instances, fails to deliver this service, in spite of there being an expectation from the community that such a service should and will be provided.
The government’s approach to waste really is quite erratic. You have mixed messages about how committed it is. We heard how committed it was to no waste by 2010. The 2010 bit got dropped because that was unachievable, in spite of it being very achievable, by the government’s own admission, in the early part of that decade. Then we had the government saying, “No, it’s an aspirational target.” At all points in this journey the government has been telling us how committed it is to reducing waste and how committed it is to working towards a no waste situation. Yet if you actually look at what this government has committed to and if you actually look at its tangible policies, you simply do not see that on the ground.
In 2008 the Canberra Liberals took a policy to the election entitled “green bins for Canberra”. It was in response to an expectation by the community that this kind of service would be delivered by a local jurisdiction such as the ACT. When you look at the total waste to ACT landfills over the last 20-odd years there was a significant decrease in the mid-1990s. However, since then it really has plateaued. We are not
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