Bin Brother is watching you
There is revolution going on in waste management, which Big Brother would be proud of.
Tucked away under the rim of wheelie bins found in two Sydney councils are small radio frequency tracking devices collecting information on a household's waste habits.
Randwick Mayor Bruce Notley-Smith told The World Today they are the way of the future.
"We will be able to find out the weights of the various bins and collect the data, the entire amount, as opposed to the quantity that is recyclable," he said.
The garbage truck reads the data on the bin, weighs the bin, and the data is collated on a computer.
"We've aimed to increase or target problem areas in the city where there's a lower level of recycling," Mr Notley-Smith said.
"The fact is that 50 per cent of the city of Randwick is multi-unit dwellings and we have faced a number of challenges there with getting compliance with recycling."
The data collected will allow the council to confirm which areas are recycling and which are not.
Ryde is the other council using the tracking devices. It has done so since 2006 and says it has helped to raise local recycling rates to about 48 per cent.
But champions of recycling, such as Clean Up Australia founder Ian Kiernan, are underwhelmed.
"I don't believe they deserve huge praise for an environmental initiative because I don't think it is that," he said.
"I think it's simply a somewhat effective commercial move. It's like when you have metered electricity, you can look at your meter and see how you can count it back.
"But this information is not going back to the consumer, to the rubbish producer, the householder - it is simply for that particular waste company to keep a track of its bins."
The data collected by the tracking devices is supposed to stay between the council and the contractor, WSN Environmental Solutions, due to privacy concerns.
Mr Kiernan says the information should be shared with the garbage thrower.
"They could say, 'We've got to cut down on what we're paying to get rid of your rubbish. We obviously need to remove some of the recycling that's going into the waste stream, or we've got to look at our purchasing so we're buying less packaging.' And [there are] so many things that you can do in that little household audit, once you have the data," he said.
But Mr Notley-Smith says he is not in it to make money for the council.
"It's our obligation to collect as much as for our recyclable material as we possibly can and reduce as much as we can the amount of waste going into landfill," he said.
"The commercial imperative is not the issue here. We're trying to minimise the amount of waste which is going into landfill.
"The contractor, what they actually do with the recyclable material, that's for the market to decide."
Recycling can be big business. It is no surprise that one of Australia's richest men is the 'Cardboard King', Richard Pratt.
Mr Kiernan says more needs to be done on the individual, government and business level to reduce waste.
"Some proportion of what is recyclable is actually going to landfill because it's convenient and it can be cheaper than recycling," he said.
"Now, I haven't tracked down the validity of those claims, but we've just got to realise that we have got to improve our waste management.
"And the good operators are doing it, they're looking to how they do it everyday. But just putting tags on bins is not a huge stride forward in the name of the environment."
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