Myth – Recycling just ends up in landfill No way! Landfill is expensive and wasteful - so recycling isn’t just good for the planet, it's good for business!
Each year ~1,043,500 recycling bins are emptied in our City and taken to the Resource Recovery Group’s Canning Vale Centre. The machinery sorts hard rigid plastics, steel and aluminium, glass, paper and cardboard into bales, which are bought by businesses both on and offshore, who reprocess them into new products. See it for yourself –
sign up to attend a community tour.
Myth - Bagging up my recycleables is fine No, it's not! Anything in a bag is sent to landfill.
Bags could contain all sorts of contamination. Facility staff need to sort through up to 60 tonnes of waste an hour on a conveyor belt - they don't have the time to sort through bags (which could also be hazardous).
Myth – Plastic bags and other soft plastics go in the recycling bin Not true. Soft plastics (plastic packets, wrappers and bags) get tangled up in the machinery and stop it from working. They also behave like paper, and so contaminate the paper bales, making it harder to recycle to a high quality. Put your soft plastics into the red lidded general waste bin.
Myth – Plastic bottle lids, cutlery and straws can go in the recycling bin No, they can’t. These items are too small and pass through sorting 'cracks' in the machinery. They are often made of a number of plastic types, making it difficult to sort into the correct plastic stream.
Plastics must be at least the size of your palm to go into the recycling bin. PAnything smaller goes into the red lidded general waste bin.
Myth – Clothes, shoes and textiles can go in the recycling bin Unfortunately not. The machinery at the recycling facility is only designed to sort hard rigid plastics, steel and aluminium, glass, paper and cardboard. Textiles contaminate the recycling streams. Please donate good quality textiles to charity and put damaged textiles in the red lidded general waste bin.
Myth – Biodegradable and compostable things are fine to go in the recycling bin Not true! These are usually made from a plant based material that looks like plastic but does not behave like plastic, so contaminates the recyclable plastics stream. Please put these items in the red lidded general waste bin. Do not put anything other than green Australian certified compostable liners in your lime-green lidded FOGO bin.