Further details have emerged about Brisbane City Council’s (BCC) Toward Zero Waste aspirations, despite the lack of any official policy release. The council strategy sets out end-of-pipe targets to cut landfill disposal and increase recycling through to 2026, although its stronger focus is working upstream to cut generation rates. “Our present ‘throw-away’ or ‘disposable’ society mindset will need to be vastly altered,” it states.

BCC is Australia’s largest local government authority and said, “faced with the continual challenge of managing the waste from a large and growing city in the most sustainable way… our vision for the future is to set the city on a course Towards Zero Waste”.

“This will require a significant behavioral shift within our community,” acknowledges the strategy document, pointing out if the community fails to move away from a “throw-away” mentality, “the economic reality is more and more ratepayer funds will need to be spent on managing waste”.

Targets first appeared on the council’s website last June, including for waste disposal to drop to about 172kg per person, a 3% annual reduction, by 2026. Inside Waste has now seen further details of the strategy.

According to the Harry Copeland, manager of strategy & projects for the City Waste Services, “procurement is really the cornerstone for everything we’re doing… that’s the real key to getting anything happening”. This includes council looking at its own purchasing policies.

The four overarching goals of the strategy are to communicate waste avoidance, waste minimisation, litter prevention and other waste management issues to residents and visitors; to provide world class waste management infrastructure and services; to maximise the recovery, reuse and recycling of resources; and to reduce the volume of waste being disposed to landfill.

The sunshine state, home to some of Australia’s cheapest landfill disposal rates, has not been considered a leading force in improving Australian waste management to date. But BCC has a bold vision of tuning that around: “ultimately, the goal is that by 2026, Brisbane’s residents and businesses will lead Australia in the net reduction of domestic, commercial and industrial wastes.”

A change of focus
“Currently, the primary considerations in waste management decision making have by necessity focused on minimal risk to the environment and to public health, while ensuring a high level of community satisfaction with the services provided,” the strategy states.

“We have already assembled one of the world’s safest and most efficient waste management systems. A fleet of waste and recycling vehicles using latest technologies is used to transport waste to engineered (fully lined and sealed) landfills that are equipped for gas extraction and leachate recovery.

“Our current systems are good but we can do better. To make the improvements that we want, our focus needs to shift from the present ‘disposal’ system to the wider arena of waste minimisation, beneficial reuse and resource recovery.

“Recent predictions by the Queensland Government’s Planning Information Forecasting Unit (PIFU) predict Brisbane’s population in the metropolitan area alone will grow from 1.8 million in 2006 to 2.4 million in 2026. In that period, construction activity will double and manufacturing industries will increase by five times the current level. This growth will bring additional waste that needs to be managed.

“Today, it is commonly thought that waste disposed to landfill is the inevitable consequence of a prosperous society, but this assumption is incorrect. A better approach is to utilise waste as a resource. For example, in a natural eco-system, the waste from one process becomes the resource for another.

“As a community, we must adopt this view if the Brisbane of 2026, with its growing population, is to be prosperous and sustainable. The Towards Zero Waste strategy aims to introduce initiatives that result in long-term waste minimisation and beneficial reuse opportunities.

“The waste we could avoid generating and the resources we could recover should be seen as an asset that will enrich our resource-base, create employment opportunities and contribute to the economic fabric of Brisbane and ultimately improve environmental outcomes.”

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