Help inform future thinking about waste.
Did you know that we have a waste and recycling strategy?
Don’t Waste It! 2022-2025 is a three-year strategy to transform the City of Port Phillip’s waste services. It’s up for review, and we need to write a new one! Before we get started, we want to know how it impacted you.
As a staff member, we are interested in what you know about Don’t Waste It! 2022-2025 as this will help us decide what comes next.
We’ll be coming back to ask more questions as we develop the new strategy. We’ll be talking to the councillors and community about what they’d like to see in the new strategy as well.
But what we want to hear from you now, is about the existing strategy.
Click here to go straight to the Survey
Or read more below about our targets and how we went.
What we said we would do: | Did we do it? | How'd we go? |
Reduce FOGO in the garbage bin by 20-30 per cent | No ☹ | No change of FOGO in kerbside garbage bins*. |
Audit communal FOGO bins | Sort of | We conducted a limited audit of communal FOGO bins, examining 9 per cent of the total to determine their composition. |
Deliver a satisfying FOGO service (70-80 per cent of households are satisfied) | Sort of | We consulted with residents living in single unit dwellings on their kerbside FOGO service, 84 per cent of respondents were satisfied with their service**. We have not surveyed residents living in apartments or those using the communal hubs. |
Keep contamination in FOGO bins under 5 per cent | Success 😊 | The average contamination of FOGO kerbside bins is 3.1 per cent |
Reduce FOGO in Council garbage bins by 30-40 per cent | We don’t know | We don’t know if there has been a reduction in all Council buildings. We started auditing more Council buildings in 2024 and rolled out FOGO to a few more buildings. FOGO in the garbage stream at SKTH increased by 8.47 per cent from 2022 to 2023 (which is not good 🙁) |
* This is based on audits conducted in November 2023. Houses had only just received FOGO bins and apartments had not yet received them.
**This is from an engagement piece conducted in March 2024. There were 176 eligible responses.
Did you know that 40.8 per cent of the waste in kerbside garbage bins is food and organic waste?
That’s 7000 tonnes of food waste per year going directly to landfill, instead of being recycled into mulch or compost.
What’s in our kerbside garbage bins?
What we don't know
- We don’t know who is using the communal FOGO bins.
- We don’t know how to make it easier for staff to reduce FOGO waste in council garbage bins and increase FOGO waste in FOGO bins.
- We don’t know if we are measuring satisfaction of the service in the best way.
- We don't know how to encourage residents to scrape old or unused food into the FOGO bin before throwing out the container. For example, instead of putting the bag and mouldy bread in the garbage bin, we want people to empty the bread into the FOGO bin first.
What we said we would do | Did we do it? | How we did |
Keep contamination low in glass bins (under 5 per cent) | Yes | We are at 2.62 per cent contamination (that’s great!). |
Audit communal glass bins | Sort of | We audited some glass bins. |
Reduce glass materials in kerbside recycling bins by 10-20 per cent | No | Glass in kerbside recycling was 34.59 per cent in 2022 and 41.81 per cent in 2023 (aka increase). |
Deliver a satisfying communal glass service (80-90 per cent of households are satisfied) | No | We don’t have an easy way of asking this! |
What we know
- We know the glass hubs are not used as much as expected.
What we don’t know
- If the glass hubs work? Do you have any thoughts on this?
- We don’t think they work because it is easier/more convenient for residents to use their kerbside recycling bin.
What we said we would do | Did we do it? | How we did |
Reduce kerbside recycling contamination
| Sort of | 10 per cent contamination in houses and townhouses (so we didn’t do it)
11.57 per cent contamination for units and apartments (so we did it) |
5 per cent contamination rate in Council building recycling bins | No | 11.1 per cent contamination in council recycling bins – so we haven’t done it (we really need to up our game) *** |
*** This is based off audits conducted in November 2023 of 10 council buildings. The contamination rate at SKTH is a lot higher.
What’s in our kerbside mixed recycling bins?
The reason we measure houses and townhouses differently from apartments and units is because:
- We know it’s easy to educate one or two families as opposed to hundreds.
- We know we have a lot of resident turnover in apartment buildings.
We know that the kerbside mixed recycling bin is made up of about 40per cent glass. Ideally, all this glass will go to the glass bin. This is for two reasons:
- From 1 July 2027, glass is likely to be considered a contaminant in the mixed recycling bin by the State Government. The correct place to put glass, legally speaking, will be in the glass bin or Victorian Container Deposit Scheme (CDS).
- It’s easier to recycle and sort glass if it isn’t mixed in with paper and cardboard.
What we want to know:
- Why is there still so much glass in the kerbside mixed recycling bin?
- We think that CoPP residents aren’t using the communal glass bins because it’s easier to use the household mixed recycling bin – but we don’t know for sure.
What we said we would do | Did we do it? | How we did |
Reduce the amount of garbage we produce per household
| Sort of | 17.5 per cent reduction for houses and townhouses (so we’re close!) 56 per cent reduction for apartments and units (so we did it!) |
20-30 per cent reduction in the garbage stream for Council buildings | We don’t know | We haven’t measured this yet – are doing this now (November) |
What we know:
Top 4 materials by weight in garbage bin:
- Avoidable food (food that was once in an edible state before disposal)
- Unavoidable food (food we can’t eat like meat bones, eggshells, fruit skins)
- Containerised food/liquid – sealed
- Nappies/hygiene products
We know that items in the garbage bin are often:
- Made up of mixed materials or are confusing. Historically, the message has been if you’re not sure, put it in the bin. We need to change that message.
- Combined items – such as food in packaging
- Packaging
What we don’t know:
- Why did we measure such a big reduction for apartments and units? We have some theories but don’t know for sure.
- How can we get people to reduce their general waste?
- How can we get people to dispose of items in the correct bin?
What we said we would do | Did we do it? | How we did |
Increase community satisfaction with public bins | No | We haven’t measured this! How would we measure it? |
Reduce reported dumped rubbish issues | No | This is not a good measure – we don’t necessarily want to reduce the amount of reporting, because we want all dumped rubbish to be reported. Instead, we want to reduce the amount of rubbish actually dumped. We don’t know how to measure that right now. |
Reduce the garbage stream for public place bins | No | We have not reduced the amount of waste in our bins. |
What we know
- We know we have a lot of tourists and visitors – but are they really to blame for how much garbage we get?
- We know that people use the bin available to them – so if there’s a garbage bin and no recycling bin, we know that people will often put their recycling in the garbage bin rather than carry it until they find a recycling bin.
- Our recycling bins are highly contaminated and it looks like there is a lot of wish cycling, particularly with coffee cups.
- There
is a lot of CDS material in our public recycling bins (44.3 per cent to be
exact).
What we don’t know:
- Ultimately, we really don’t know why people don’t use public place bins correctly. People seem to put anything they like in them. Businesses put extra waste in them. Sometimes businesses will move public bins closer to their business so customers can put rubbish in them. Tourists and residents use them haphazardly.
A circular economy moves us away from a linear mindset – take, use and throw away. Instead, it focuses on opportunities to reduce the environmental impacts of production and consumption through promoting reuse, recovery and recycling of materials.
The idea behind a circular economy is that materials never become waste, and products and materials are kept in circulation. This involves maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, recycling and composting.
Some of the things we might do at CoPP to enhance the circular economy are:
- include compost from our FOGO bins back into our gardens
- support local businesses that take surplus items and rework them
- support organisations based on sharing or renting models, like the Elwood Kitchen library where community members can borrow items instead of buying them.
What we said we would do | Did we do it? |
Work with a FOGO processor to use processed FOGO materials within CoPP public spaces and gardens | We are planning to do this. |
Increase the use of recycled glass in Port Phillip construction and infrastructure projects, including road resurfacing. | No |
Work with our separated glass processor to use the glass collected through our communal hubs within Port Phillip construction and infrastructure projects, including road resurfacing. | No |
Work with our separated glass processor to identify other local uses for the glass collected through our communal hubs | No |
What we know
- We have a dedicated glass processor for the communal glass hubs who recycles collected glass into glass products.
- We have not increased the amount of recycled glass in our infrastructure projects. If we are wrong, let us know!
- We don’t appear to have any embedded circularity. A new question about circularity has been added to the PID (Project Ideation Document) process but that is very much just a first step.
What we don’t know:
- The appetite from our community for Circular Economy. We don’t know what we don’t know!
