In July 2019, recycling business SKM Recycling, which held contracts with 33 councils in the State of Victoria, announced it would no longer be accepting recyclables. 

The City of Ballarat is a regional council in Victoria and was impacted by the closure, but is now leading the way for recycling by removing glass from roadside recycling collection. This is a positive response to SKM’s collapse, which sadly left dozens of councils stranded with tonnes of recycleable waste destined for landfill. 

The City of Ballarat welcomed recent recommendations from a Parliamentary waste review which confirmed the regional Council is ahead of the game. The Council has been praised for removing glass from its kerbside recycling and refusing to send domestic recycling to landfill after the SKM collapse.

Kerbside recycling advisors worked with residents, educating them about the need for change. The City is now applauding their efforts with a contamination rate from glass down to just 1%. 

“This is a pretty remarkable result when you consider we have asked our residents to radically change their entrenched recycling habits and take their glass to a drop off point,” Mayor Ben Taylor said.

“Our hope now is that governments work with local Councils to find a long-term, solution to recycling and new markets for our glass.”

The initiative is being delivered by an agreement between the City of Ballarat and Australian Paper Recovery (APR). According to APR Directing Manager Darren Thorpe,

“Separating glass out from other recyclable materials is increasingly becoming the norm… It’s not possible to reuse paper and cardboard to create moulded fibre products, things like egg cartons or fruit trays which are used to carry food, if there’s any chance they may have pieces of broken glass stuck in them.”

Assessments at the Smythesdale Landfill shows that up to 750 tonnes a year of paper and cardboard from Ballarat’s residential kerbside services end up in landfill after people have put it in their rubbish bin instead of their recycling bin. To address this, the City of Ballarat has partnered with Kerbside Recycling Advisers to develop a waste education program to help the community better understand what can and can’t be recycled.

Written by Timothy Shue and Zoe Goodman