Waste Working Group
Council’s Waste Working Group is made up of councillors, community representatives, council waste and sustainability staff and a waste specialist consultancy.
The purpose of Council’s Waste Working Group is to guide, oversee and provide direct input into the waste strategy development process.
Working Group Site Visits
The group has visited waste and recycling facilities throughout NSW, examining available processing options for our recyclables, green waste, bulky waste, organic and mixed waste.
Our clean green waste with minimal contamination is being composted at Kimbriki’s Resource Recovery Centre’s outdoor compost facility. This facility is not licenced to accept food waste which has to go to a highly specialised composting facility at much greater cost.
Hornsby Shire’s yellow lid bin recycling program is strong despite the China ban causing a global recycling crisis. Our recyclables are going to the Visy Materials Recycling Facility at Smithfield where they are sorted and sent for various remanufacturing processes. Materials such as paper, cardboard, PET and HDPE plastics and glass are processed here in Sydney. Our recyclables are not being stockpiled or going to landfill.
Our red lid bin waste is currently taken to Clyde Transfer Station railway intermodal where it is transported by train to Tarago near Goulburn and sent to a bio-reactor landfill in an old open cut mine pit.
Suez SAWT Facility at Kemps Creek is one of only three Alternative Waste Treatment (AWT) processing plants available to Sydney councils. This is the only plant that accepts food and garden waste (FOGO) for composting. The above photo shows FOGO bin material from a Sydney council with high plastic contamination rates that significantly impacts on the quality of the clean garden waste, even after 10 years of community education.
“Participating in the tours of waste facilities available to Sydney councils as a community representative was an enriching, enjoyable and eye opening experience. I now have a much better understanding of the issues and challenges that Hornsby Council faces in delivering reliable, economical and environmentally sustainable waste management services to our beautiful Shire. I really value the opportunity to provide input and participate in the process of developing the waste strategy for Hornsby Shire. ”
“I was very keen to see our food waste go into our garden waste bin and thought it was very straight forward but after seeing the high levels of contamination in this FOGO bin material at the processing plant and hearing how much it will cost and still not get our community to 70% landfill diversion , I realise we need to carefully consider making this important decision.”