Letters - Yet another bin

By Yarra Editor

Apr 16, 2024

The four new bin options for ratepayers.

There were concerns expressed about the environmental value of the green bins foisted on us by Moira Shire Council a few years back, and the same concerns arise with the planned purple bin. Much the same recycling benefit would have been achieved by the Shire giving households a compost bin rather than the green bins, and the dollar and environmental costs of the manufacture and collection of the green bins would have been avoided. (I’ve not put out my green bin once since they were introduced, but compost the material instead – perhaps that warrants asking the council for a discount on my rates?)

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Now that Victoria has a container deposit scheme in place, the argument for another bin for glass bottles loses its force.

It is to be hoped that container users will use the scheme rather than toss their bottles in a bin. And maybe for those who don’t choose to use the scheme, the solution is the return of the “bottle-o” of the past (these were people who collected empty bottles to claim the refund on them).

Council has given us three options for collection arrangements when we come to have four bins.

Option 1 is the superior one from an environmental point of view as it involves fewer (six) collections per month than the current eight collections. That option also lowers collection and recycling costs for council, but will we receive a cut in our rates or collection charges with the savings council reaps? We should.

In this regard, it’s hard not to see the bins as another means of shire councils getting around the rates cap – we already pay an environment levy, a green bin levy, a recycle bin levy and will have to pay a purple bin levy. These levies are effectively means by which ratepayers pay to save shire council’s money (though reducing waste going to landfill).

Incidentally, it’s both amusing and dismaying to see the four bins take up most, sometimes all, of the miniscule front areas of houses and units in Melbourne inner city areas and clogging up the parking areas of apartment blocks.

It won’t be like that in most parts of Moira Shire, but with the ever-decreasing size of house blocks and more units and apartments, it’s an emerging issue.

Mick Shadwick

Yarrawonga

By Yarra Editor