Wastewise continues to grow and work actively in the waste area. Continual updating of our recycling list with new items is really quite exciting, although creating a printing challenge to keep it up-to-date as new opportunities in Benalla come on board!
We now have a collection point for plastic lids, wine bottle tops and crown seals at the rear of Rambling Rose in the clearly labelled yellow lid bin. This is a charity fundraiser for Rotary. We are very happy to have another Benalla business involved and to support Rotary’s philanthropic work.
A surprising recent outcome has been the number of views on Facebook of our new WasteWise page - in excess of 20,000 views in only a couple of months since inception, and the number of followers keeps growing. Questions from there as well as the many phone calls I receive indicate plenty of interest in waste reduction in Benalla and beyond.
Our filing cabinet collection point for small recyclable items (as labelled) at the Seniors and Community Centre is working really well, now that people have got the message to take their metal and plastic blister packs to the chemist, or for all-foil items straight to their own yellow bin. Our only complaint from the community has been that the building is not always open and thus people wanting to deposit items are being inconvenienced.
Our donations from the Container Deposit Scheme are funding those items that are not free to recycle (I.e. require a paid mailing box to send to the recycler).
With the Op shops telling me that they are forced to send good items to landfill due to shortage of space, Wastewise remains optimistic that we will have a Tip shop in Benalla sooner rather than later. The Transfer Station is ideal in our view for such a facility: with all household loads being inspected maybe a sticker could be used to identify suitable items for the tip shop.
We are trialling a collection system for special plastic but not making it available to the general public as yet. This is a specific type of plastic that is sold to become oil.
My thanks to our team Mike, Karen, Judy and Leanne (and Shannon from BRCC) for their involvement, enthusiasm and advice, and a special thank you to Karen for our list updates and printing.
North East Waste Alliance (NEWA):
Our most recent meeting was last Saturday; we have enthusiastic members from across the region who are keen to do their bit. We have decided to ramp up our submissions to medication package manufacturers in the hope that they will change from the combined plastic and metal blister packs to bottles or all metal packs.
We also endorsed the collection of the special plastic mentioned above.
We continue to do our "coalface" swapping including material, polystyrene, pens etc and bubble wrap. I have added the new Rotary collection to the group.
Kay Blore, Convenor
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