It’s incredible to think that after only two weeks of formal collections, which essentially only means one pickup from each household with the green FOGO bin across the shire, around 200 tonnes of organic waste has been diverted away from landfill.

It’s a credit to the whole community that those collections have resulted in a very small percentage of contamination – about one per cent overall according the the BVSC Waste and Recycling team.

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Challenges remain, such as families that make use of nappies taking issue with new fortnightly red bin collections rather than weekly, and the few households that haven’t quite grasped the FOGO concept and put all manner of items in their green bin.

Images shared by the council during the past fortnight of polystyrene bean bag beans, plastic milk and soft drink bottles and junk mail magazines mixed in with the kitchen and grass clippings put a dampener on the whole initiative. Admittedly a very small one, given the rollout of FOGO has had far worse results in other shires.

While it is always a good time to focus on what we’re throwing out and how it could be repurposed, it’s particularly relevant as it’s National Recycling Week this week (November 12-18).

To mark the week, Planet Ark released results to community and council surveys on a range of issues dealing with recycling. 

Encouragingly, based on the research conducted by Pollinate for Planet Ark, 90 per cent of Australians believe recycling is the right thing to do.

However, only 42 per cent believe kerbside collections make it to recycling centres, while 21 per cent believe it goes to landfill. The remaining 27 per cent responded that they were unsure what happens to it.

In terms of council issues, a Planet Ark survey of 180 local councils found the top recycling “mistakes” included putting soft plastics in recycling (46 per cent) and bagging recyclables first before placing in the yellow bins (41 per cent).

READ MORE: FOGO benefits outweigh any hurdles

How to deal more effectively with food and organic waste was identified by many councils as a priority (25 per cent), just slightly ahead of developing markets for recyclable materials (24 per cent).

With FOGO in place in the Bega Valley we’ve ticked several of those boxes already. There are also several avenues to return soft plastics to collection points at supermarkets. We also have the reverse vending machines taking many of our drink containers for recycling and repurposing.

Only a little remains to do – similar to the much smaller amounts of landfill we should be leaving in our red bins – and that is community education.

Separating our household waste into different streams as we create it; taking the small additional effort to return soft plastics, cans and bottles; and making sure we have the correct waste in the right bin. It doesn’t take much, but has a large effect, both for the benefit of our environment, and council (read: ratepayers) finances.