By CRISPIN HULL People can be very house proud. They like to show you their latest furniture, their new kitchen bench, vegetable garden or some other accoutrement of modern suburban living.
But this night it was different. It was a coolish night about six of seven months ago. We were over at some friends’ place in Kaleen for dinner.
What was it to be? A new tropical-fish tank perhaps? A new CD player? A modernised bathroom?
No. We were led outside and proudly shown two green plastic wheelie bins.
“”It’s bloody magnificent,” our host said. “”I haven’t been near the tip for weeks. Paper in this side and glass, cans and plastic bottles in the other side.”
“”But you can’t mix up glass and can and plastic,” I said.
“”Yep. They fix it at the other end.”
He was openly smug about the superior Kaleen garbage system which no-one else in Canberra had.
The dinner party degenerated in garbage stories and the horrors of dogs tipping over the bin and strewing garbage all over the footpath.
It happened week after week in our street. One day I heard the crunch of garbage-can metal and I raced out the front screaming: “”Get out of there you rotten mongrel or I’ll kick your balls in!”
This was followed by profuse apologies when it actually turned out to be the neighbour carrying his can out.
The Kaleen host laughed superciliously.
Now we all own the wheelie bins. And this is the key to their success, according to Urban Services Minister David Lamont.
Canberra’s belated entry to the world of big bins has been more an experiment in human behaviour than an exercise in economics or environmental studies.
Any idiot economist with a computer screen and a bit of data can do the costing. Some quick samples reveal how much recyclable stuff is being thrown out. Add up how much garbage is dumped, how much landfill costs and how much it costs to collect small bins. Subtract from it how much can be got for recyclable material, how much the new bins cost and costs of collection.
Any idiot environmentalist can work out the difference in greenhouse emissions of the two systems.
What they cannot work out, however, is the human behaviour. In what circumstances will they stop bundling everything together and chucking it away. What mix of effort, penalty, reward and peer pressure would work?
You could guess. You could just apply what seemed to work elsewhere. You could ask hypothetical questions. Or you could do it the hard but proven way _ by experiment.
The experiment worked. And it has been well worth the delay. But as Lamont said, it is only the end of the beginning. There was a long way to go with waste management in Canberra.
The experiment in Kaleen for a year and for a lesser time elsewhere tried many different combinations of collecting waste and recyclables in several different containers.
And the past two weeks reveal that the final result of the Kaleen experiment held true for all of Canberra.
The experiment showed that Canberrans, like everyone else, think recycling is a Good Thing, but they are not prepared to put very much effort into it. They are not prepared to do it for the Greater Glory of Australia, for some nebulous common good or in some vague hope that rates might be cut. There has to be some immediate benefit to the household which outweighs the effort required.
People were not prepared to separate recyclables into four or five different containers. They were not prepared to lug recycling crates around the place, as suggested by the Energy Alliance. The system had to be simple.
But at the receiving end, the reverse was true. People buying material for recycling wanted it neatly separated. Sorting it was expensive and sometimes unworkable.
But while the Kaleen experiment was going on, sorting technology was improving. Even 18 months ago, our present system would not have worked because glass chips get mixed with paper. But now Canberra has got the best of both worlds.
There is a huge 99 per cent compliance _ the highest in Australia. People are not putting the wrong things in the wrong place.
The feel-good of recycling is being almost effortless transferred into action. There is a small element of coercion. If you don’t put your recyclables into the recycle bin, the waste bin will fill too quickly and you may have to go to the tip.
There is a small element of peer pressure within households: children or partners will quickly prevent rogues chucking waste into the recycle bin. There is a large element of household benefit: fewer tip trips; no dogs; generally tidier; no paying for bins.
But what about the big picture.
Before wheelies, garbage collection cost Canberra $5.75 million a year to collect (including costs of bins). Collection costs in the new system will be about $1 million a year more than that, but it will be more than off-set by reductions in landfill costs.
Lamont says that as recycling technology improves, the demand for recyclables will go up and their price will rise. This means that when the collecting contract is re-tendered in seven years time, the ACT can expect a better deal.
In the first two weeks, the wheelie bins have been a huge success. The 500 tonnes of glass was 150 per cent more than estimates. The 600 tonnes of paper was 20 per cent more. The excess will benefit the contractor in the short term, but when the contract is re-tendered the extra recyclables will help cut the contract costs.
But before we start patting ourselves on the back, there is still a long way to go.
The table shows that we are now recycling 35 per cent of the kerbside collection, which previously went to landfill. That amounts to about 20,000 tonnes a year, which is 8.5 per cent of the ACT’s total waste sent to landfill of 235,000 tonnes. Still 8.5 per cent in one hit is not a bad start to an overall reduction of 50 per cent by 2000 which was targeted by the national waste strategy.
Where is the rest to come from?
Well, 45 per cent of household kerbside garbage going to waste is recyclable organic material. We have to compost more. The Canberra Conservation Council has suggested each household gets a free composting bin to help with the task.
A further 9 per cent of household kerbside garbage going to waste is recyclable plastic.
But even if all recyclable household kerbside garbage was actually recycled, there would still be a problem. The trouble is that Canberra households take as much to the tip themselves as is taken there by the kerbside collection. And Canberra householders take as much to the tip as commercial dumpers. Indeed, much of the commercial dump is from households anyway.
About a quarter of the householders’ dump is garden waste _ trailer-loads of trimmings and clippings. How can these be composted better?
These answers to this sort of question will be sought from the community, according to Lamont.
If nothing had been done, the landfill sites at Mugga Lane and West Belconnen would be full in six years.
Lamont says that whatever happens, the community has to own the process or it will not work. The experience with the wheelie bins bears that out.
Other cities have not had anywhere near the acceptance rate as Canberra and have had far lower rates of recycling. So it is no good designing systems that have the potential for high percentages of recycling if the human factor does not allow the potential to be reached.
Waste management and the changes to the ACT water regime make an interesting comparison with planning, over which the Government has been criticised for lack of genuine consultation and which is a running sore in Canberra.
What was the difference?
Lamont said, “”The issues that were raised were raised and addressed in that community process. There was no set agenda there was no definitive proposal put out by [the authorities].”
The only givens from the government side were the existing system and infrastructure and information. The future was a blank sheet.
The Kaleen experiment enabled people to “”own” the result _ to be proud of it.
“”The community has got to own the process; or it won’t work,” Lamont said. “”It has to reflect the values of the community.
“”Over the next year, we’re going to ask the community for further ways of recycling, reuse, waste management.”
Several issues come to mind: dealing with waste from public places, recycling of oil, disposal of dangerous goods and getting builders to dump less through designs that resuse material on site through mounds and landscape.
Builders’ spoil is a big ticket item. In the past year, tip fees have cut it in half. It used to be half of all material dumped at landfill and is now about a third. The easy solution is to dump, but it can be the costliest. Using material on site can save transport costs, some building costs and can result in a more imaginative built and landscape form.
Several things have been put on the waste-management agenda by his Assembly colleagues. Container deposit legislation is one. It has been vigorously resisted by soft-drink manufacturers, but it was notoriously successful in the 1960s when it was good economics to wash and reuse. Now new bottles are cheaper. The manufacturers don’t care much what happens to the empty. But they do care it the shelf price goes up 60 cents or so because of bottle deposits. From a community perspective, though, such a deposit would result in a quick clean up of the empties by armies of children seeking cash or would result in fewer bottles and cans being chucked away in the first place.
Lamont may find that if he follows the Kaleen experiment through that he will get a far wider and effective range of solutions to waste management than if he listens only to the professional lobbyists.
They will only give him solutions based on ideology or the hip pocket: deep-green enthusiasts with unworkable recycling crates or selfish manufacturers and commercial operators wanting to privatise profits and socialise their losses through dumping their waste cheaply and expecting the community to pick up the tab.
The Kaleen experiment can be easily dismissed as a whole of farnarkling which delayed Canberra getting big bins. But in the long run it is more likely to give more effective waste management _ not only in just the kerbside collections it was directed at, but as an example of the way to go about putting in place any new policy.