It was this time last year the piles of hard rubbish started to bother me.
You know the stacks of old desks, chairs, broken toys, mattresses — stuff too big for the standard green bin — that gets put out for council collection, or kerbside pickup.
If you grew up in a family like mine, hard rubbish collection was a pretty exciting time. “Quality trash” my dad called it.
Well into my adulthood, various items of furniture in my house were garnered via other people’s footpaths. When moving out of home in the early 2000s, Mum called me excitedly one morning after her daily walk. She’d spotted a mid-century, Scandi-style, wood-frame sofa on someone’s kerb. She thought she’d re-upholster it. Did I want it? Of course I did. That sofa served me for almost 20 years.
But walking through the streets of Bayside in Sydney’s industrious south, I was struck by a depressing realisation: It was mostly crap. Good quality pieces replaced by chipboard and broken Ikea knock-offs. Lots of plastic. Especially toys. Broken pool noodles and stuffed synthetic animals. Plastic bags jammed with miscellaneous junk.
Smaller pieces burst from bags and scattered in the gutters. In the inevitable oncoming showers, they would be floating down the drain.
Of course, disposing of waste is a necessary function of any society. But did it have to be like this?
Mixed rubbish illegally dumped next to a vacant lot in Bexley, south Sydney. Photo: Prue Tehan.
I’d read recently that almost every single piece of plastic ever made still exists, (a claim some researchers describe as too “all-encompassing”), and another recent report by Greenpeace which claimed Ikea was destroying some of Europe’s last remaining ancient forests in its pursuit of producing low-priced baby-cribs, and children’s beds.
Out the front of a slightly shabby 1970s brown-brick apartment building was a particularly lengthy explosion of someone’s life, what looked like the entire contents of a household scattered along the footpath and nature strip. As I stood surveying the scene, local resident Malcolm Cowan approached.
“I’ve already reported it to the EPA,” he told me.
I asked why, when council pickup was scheduled in the next couple of weeks.
“It’s a danger, it’s ridiculous” he said. “It’s a hazard for the public, the tenants… it’s obstructing the footpath.
“We’ve had strangers from random construction sites come and drop off waste multiple times. It could be anyone dumping here.”
Cowan has lived in the area for 25 years and wants to see a surveillance camera put up in the area to capture number plates of illegal dumpers.
“The gold standard would be at least one surveillance camera with night vision which can capture number plates,” he opines wistfully.
He doesn’t think it’s likely in the near future, but the behaviour drives him crazy, adding: “It’s just taking the p***.”
The footpath in front of Malcolm Cowan’s mother’s house. Photo: Prue Tehan
***
As the weeks went on, the piles of rubbish in the streets of Bayside multiplied and grew bigger. Frequent heavy rain meant everything was waterlogged, and I felt sorry for the workers tasked with lifting the sodden mattresses and sofas into their trucks.
In quieter streets piles of illegal junk were dumped, occasionally surrounded with a few metres of black and yellow hazard tape, and a note from the council saying it had been reported. Signs were another half-hearted attempt to control the situation.
‘The depositing of refuse in this area is prohibited. Offenders will be prosescuted’ an ancient one half-heartedly stated, beside a large pile of assorted junk, much of which wasn’t recyclable.
It was strange and sad, this rubbish ‘free-for-all’.
Signs are ignored. Photo: Prue Tehan.
People I spoke with didn’t have a positive outlook about ‘the waste situation’ generally.
“It doesn’t matter what we do, it all ends up in the same place,” was a familiar sentiment, along with various iterations of “don’t worry about individuals, it’s the big corporates that do the damage”.
Some had seen Craig Reucassel’s War on Waste series that first aired in 2017, disappointing (but not necessarily surprising) viewers when tracking devices placed in several plastic bags destined for REDcycle — the soft plastics recycling program endorsed by Coles and Woolies — ended up in landfill or shipped overseas rather than melted down and made into utilitarian items like park benches, bollards, decking, council signing, and speed bumps. Less than five years later, the company collapsed dramatically after they failed to pay the storage fees for 11,000 tonnes of soft plastic, and were found to have no way of processing the materials.
What many didn’t realise at the time was that Reucassel’s series was a sign of bigger things to come, with 2018 forcing the biggest wake-up call of Australia’s waste system in history. It wasn’t going to be pretty.
Another sidewalk waste dump. Photo: Prue Tehan.
Finally, it was collection week.
Slowly but surely I noticed the streets were being cleared of the piles of hard rubbish.
One Saturday morning on my way home from the bakery I found myself caught behind the council pickup truck. In front of me three men worked quickly to check then throw various items into the mechanical jaws, crunching them to pieces slowly but viciously. A chair leg stuck out like a monster’s toothpick.
As the men got back in the truck and took off, I followed behind. It looked full and didn’t stop at the next pile of waste, and I wondered if it was heading back to the depot.
I glanced at the clock. I had two hours before heading to my grandma’s for lunch. They couldn’t be travelling far… not if they were emptying every load.
In a moment of impulse, I decided to follow the truck. I felt a bit like Nancy Drew.
Photo: Prue Tehan.
In July 2017, China made an announcement that would send shockwaves through the global waste processing economy. Until that point, the world’s most populous country had also been the biggest importer of recyclable materials, taking around 30 million metric tonnes of waste (including 56 per cent of the world’s plastics) from across the world every year. From January 2018, all that would be changing, with China announcing a ban on 24 categories of solid waste, and significantly more stringent rules on the levels of contamination they would accept.
Other South East Asian countries followed suit, and suddenly many of the world’s wealthier countries including the USA, UK, Japan and Australia, found themselves unable to hide their waste problems any longer by simply shipping them away.
According to the CEO of the Waste Management Association of Australia (WMAA) at the time, Gayle Sloan, the ban affected “an annual average of 619,000 tonnes of materials — worth $523 million — in Australia alone”, or the equivalent of just over 100 Melbourne Cricket Grounds, filled to the brim with crushed plastics and other assorted recyclables.
It was a time of reckoning for the waste industry in Australia — one until then that had been largely ignored by policymakers beyond the functional, stymied from progress by a general lack of urgency and collaboration across multiple levels of government.
The 2018 National Waste Report prepared for the Commonwealth Department of the Environment and Energy revealed “Australia generates more waste than the average Western economy”.
The subsequent launch of the 2018 National Waste Policy and Action Plan committed to changing the problem. It embodied “a circular economy, shifting away from ‘take, make, use and dispose’ to a more circular approach where we maintain the value of resources for as long as possible”.
Nevertheless, and despite the Federal Government’s pledges, the reality was Australia’s waste situation was still dire. A 2020 Budget Review acknowledged that “Australia has a recycling and waste management problem”, and according to a report in the academic journal Sustainability, the value of the recycling industry in 2020 was smaller than it was in 2005.
What‘s more, we didn’t suddenly have the infrastructure to recycle over half a million tonnes of materials. The 2018 National Waste Report showed that by the end of the year, while the restrictions had strongly affected the market, exporting our waste didn’t stop, or even slow down significantly. We just found new destinations, mainly Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Malaysia and Thailand.
Seven years on from China’s ban, it seems progress is slow-moving. A 2023 report to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water noted Indonesia was still the number one recipient of Australian waste and recovered materials between July 2021 and December 2022, followed by Vietnam, Bangladesh, Malaysia and South Korea, and the overall exports of waste have remained reasonably stable, even increasing in some materials, in the last decade.
After 20 minutes of trailing a rubbish truck around the streets of southern Sydney, I arrived in an industrial corner of Mortdale, an otherwise genial residential suburb named after Thomas Mort, a Sydney industrialist known for pioneering the refrigeration of shipping meat. Down a side street lined with smash repairers, powder coating companies and Trailors R Us, the truck turned into the driveway of the Mortdale Recycling Centre, owned by Bingo Industries.
The sight of ASX-listed owners Bingo stirred a memory. A quick Google search reminds me that in February this year, former CEO Daniel Tartak, along with his ‘competitor’, Emmanuel Roussakis from Aussie Skips, were sentenced over a price fixing arrangement for demolition waste services in Sydney after an ACCC investigation. Bingo was ordered to pay fines of $30 million, just shy of the highest amount on record for a criminal cartel case.
Tartak, who’d taken over running Bingo from his father at just 29 years of age and steered its transition from a private family company to ASX-listed, was fined $100,000, ordered to carry out 400 hours of community service, and disqualified from running a company for five years. Tartak was replaced in 2021 by current CEO Chris Jeffrey, who said at the time of sentencing the company had “significantly improved [its] focus on governance and compliance” and had “a new owner, a new board, a new chair and a new executive team”. Bingo Industries was acquired by Macquarie asset management division for $2.3 billion in 2021.
There’s a lot of money in rubbish, and some of it stinks. I decide to visit another day.
Bingo’s depot at Mortdale, south Sydney. Photo: Prue Tehan.
When it comes to waste, money is really part of the problem. Part of the reason we dispose so much, is because we consume so much.
We’re not alone. According to economists at the International Monetary Fund, higher-income countries like the United States, Denmark, and New Zealand generate at least twice as much waste per capita than developing countries.
Higher-income people not only consume more goods overall, but they also use up a higher concentration of packaged and complex durable goods like cars, appliances, and electronic equipment. Also, most waste in middle- and high-income countries consists of inorganic materials, notably paper and plastic.
The International Monetary Fund Blog
Not all countries have the luxury of managing the challenge. I remembered a friend’s holiday video taken from a diving trip near Komodo National Park in Indonesia, around the same time we’d ramped up sending our junk there. At the edge of the water, half a dozen of the enormous, endangered lizards slowly stalked their way through piles of miscellaneous rubbish that had washed up on the beach, most less than the size of a playing card.
What does it say about us as a country that we treat countries in less favourable economic conditions as our literal dumping grounds?
***
A few days after my pursuit of the council rubbish truck, I go to call the Mortdale Recycling Centre. I wonder if I can get a tour, or speak to someone about what goes on there. The phone number goes through to a central Bingo Industries line, where after finding out what I want recommends just going down and chatting to whoever’s working. “They’re usually pretty good to chat,” she says. It’s a pleasantly surprising response.
Heading back to the Mortdale Recycling Centre, I climb a set of metal stairs to a short row of demountables on high stilts, heading for the door marked ‘Site Office’.
I knock and open the door to a small, sparsely furnished room with a desk, computer and a few chairs. A row of television monitors against the wall shows different angles of various plant operations… trucks emptying rubbish onto huge warehouse sorting floors, a crusher, a giant claw picking up a huge pile of assorted waste. Kostas*, a handsome 25-year-old with piercing blue eyes, is behind the desk.
When I explain I’m there to find out more about what happens to our rubbish, he is surprised, but not unwelcoming. We can’t do a site visit today (he’s the only one manning the office), but he’s happy to chat.
Over the next 20 minutes, I get a rundown of how waste processing in a facility like Mortdale Recycling Centre works.
“Years ago we used to do more processing on site, but these days we’re more a transfer station,” Kostas explains. They essentially sort the rubbish that comes in before it’s sent to a larger processing facility.
The general public can dispose of materials at Mortdale, but they must have a UHF radio in their vehicle to communicate with the site operators, and it’s not cheap. The type of rubbish massively affects the price.
“I think it’s $80/tonne for bricks, $462/Tonne for general rubbish,” he tells me.
I check later, he’s right. The difference is partly due to the time it takes to sort and break down ‘mixed rubbish’. A microwave for example will be crushed and separated into metal, plastic, glass, etc.
It’s also due to environmental impact. A pile of bricks will be crushed and re-purposed into any number of other items, likely further building supplies, whereas items that can’t be broken down, particularly those made of plastic, are likely to end up in landfill, with no current large-scale infrastructure in place to recycle and repurpose.
Trucks that arrive at Mortdale are directed on arrival to head down to the sorting pile where they dump their loads onto a large area before it’s checked, weighed, then sorted into larger piles – wood, metal, bricks, plastics, etc.
Mixed items are broken down when they can be.
“We’ve got crushers, so if you’ve got a desk or something that’s got metal and wood combined, we can break that apart and send it separately,” Kostas says. Materials that shouldn’t be in there, ie. the things you’re told by council you can’t include in hard rubbish (containers of liquid, batteries, building materials and asbestos, fire extinguishers, etc) get put back in the trucks and won’t be accepted by the plant.
And if you were looking to dispose of, say, a body? You couldn’t pick a worse place than trying to sneak it into hard rubbish collection.
“We know where basically every piece of rubbish comes from,” Kostas tells me. These days each load is monitored by a series of cameras for almost every move, from collection right through sorting and ultimate repurposing (or landfill, but we’ll come to that later).
Overall, the man seems happy in his job, and happy to chat about the functions of the plant. What he’s less clear on is what happens once things leave the plant. “We just send the stuff off to Eastern Creek,” he adds.
‘Eastern Creek’ I discover is the Eastern Creek Recycling and Ecology Park (and Landfill), also owned by Bingo and the largest integrated recycling/landfill facility in the Southern Hemisphere. It was the vision of Australia’s waste kingpin and founder of Dial-a-Dump, Ian Malouf, who sold the business (including the Eastern Creek site) to Bingo in 2018, but didn’t officially open until 2021. It’s described as “the world’s largest and most advanced dry mixed-waste recycling facility”.
Remembering the lady in the Bingo office, and ‘leaning in’ to my new investigative persona, I decide to pay Eastern Creek a visit.
***
There’s one huge advantage, if you’d call it that, that Australia has when it comes to dealing with its waste.
Space.
While Australia is not the most landfill-dependent country in the world, its reliance on landfills remains substantial compared to several other developed nations that have more advanced recycling and waste management systems. Countries in Europe and Asia, for example, often have higher recycling rates and more effective waste diversion strategies.
Exact figures vary due to inconsistent reporting, but around 40 per cent of Australia’s waste is still, basically, just thrown into a big hole. The simple fact is, for most governments, it’s just too expensive, and not an issue worth garnering enough votes to invest in significantly.
The most recent National Waste Report 2022 notes households and council operations are responsible for only 18 per cent of all waste generated in Australia. Commercial businesses and industry are responsible for 43 per cent, and construction and demolition 38 per cent.
Given this, it’s easy to see why some of my friends felt it didn’t really matter what we did in regards to our own waste. Is what we put out on the side of the road for council collection, or sneak into the recycling, that big a deal?
Delving into the figures, it becomes clear that it is. While household waste is ‘only’ responsible for 18 per cent of all waste generated in Australia, household waste tends to be more difficult to sort into different materials, contain high levels of difficult-to-recycle plastics, and be more likely to be contaminated with food and other non-compliant materials (batteries or half-filled paint tins, for example). Besides that, it’s still thousands of tonnes of mixed materials dumped into the ground and left to rot (or not) for tens, if not hundreds, of years to come.
The idea of a huge portion of Bayside’s rubbish just ending up in landfill weighed heavy on my mind.
***
The morning I head out to Greater Western Sydney towards Eastern Creek, I’m dressed for the occasion in a high-vis shirt borrowed from my husband. I’m hoping to blend in to the scene.
Arriving at the facility in the quaintly named Kangaroo Drive, it could be the entrance to any industrial business park, lined with tall gum trees and native shrubbery. It’s almost pictureseque. A few blokes in orange shirts stand around a food truck parked in the carpark. In the truck yard, maybe 100 bright orange and blue Bingo trucks are lined up, and a number of guys are tinkering away. The vibe is convivial. When I ask one about speaking to someone in charge, I’m pointed towards the education and training office.
The entrance to Eastern Creek Recycling Ecology Park (and Landfill).
Climbing the steps of the training offices, I’m walking into another demountable building. There might be money in rubbish, but it isn’t being spent on fancy buildings. Walking in to a basic office space, I’m greeted by Victoria*, one of the site training managers.
“You right there?” she asks in a friendly way, before I awkwardly explain I was wondering if they did tours of the facility.
“Hmm, you got a hard hat and steel capped boots?” I did not.
“No worries, just gimme a sec. What size shoes do you wear?” she continues. “Too easy” she replies when I answer.
Two minutes later I’m decked out in a brand new pair of CAT brand boots, and a Bingo-branded hardhat. I didn’t expect it to be this easy.
As we jumped in one of the site utes, she explains they get visitors to the site reasonably often. If they’ve got time, they’re encouraged to show them around. “We’re not hiding anything, we don’t mind,” Victoria adds.
A few minutes later we arrive at the processing plant, and she hands me a pair of earplugs and safety glasses. Around me, huge metal tanks, tubes and conveyer belts thread between the buildings, with dump trucks coming and going, both bringing and taking materials away. It’s busy but not chaotic, and it smells… totally fine. Victoria reminds me they don’t deal with food and other organics there – the vast majority of what they process is building materials. Household and council waste, or “mums and dads” as they refer to the assortment of washing machines, bed frames and bric-a-brac that comes from general households, and forms a reasonably small portion of overall waste.
The control room at Eastern Creek Recycling facility. Photo: Prue Tehan
As I enjoy my impromptu tour of the facility, I can’t help but be impressed. My guide is in her late 20s and has worked with Bingo for eight years. She’s passionate and knowledgeable about what she does (at one point she tells me “we’re basically environmentalists”), and it’s obvious from the way she introduces me to people along the way that the team culture is strong.
The plant itself is impressive, a bit like what you might imagine Willy Wonka’s Rubbish Factory to be. I hear about ‘optical sorters’ that separate natural from engineered timber, and see loads of mixed waste being sorted by giant claws operated by artificial intelligence. A central control room lined wall-to-wall with computer screens shows every operation in close-up detail. It’s fascinating stuff.
“The gamechanger four to five years ago was the asbestos gun,” Victoria tells me. It’s an EPA-approved laser gun that can pick up asbestos simply through scanning a load, and has hugely improved their efficiency in sorting and recycling mixed building waste.
Despite technological advancements, much of what they do is still manual. Steel and copper, both of which have high re-use value, are still hand-picked. In another section of the plant, a team dressed in white overcoats, hairnets, masks and safety glasses sort pieces of concrete as they run through a conveyer belt. Various materials find different pathways: Broken-down timber goes to Thailand to become fuel, crushed building materials get repurposed for roads and pathways.
The sorting floor at Eastern Creek Recycling facility. Excavators and AI-powered machines work through the piles, sorting it into various materials. Photo: Prue Tehan
Right now, the plant recycles around 80 per cent of all materials received. They’re aiming for 100 per cent.
“Most of what goes into landfill is asbestos,” Victoria says. But when I ask about household waste that can’t be recycled, she acknowledges that while it’s less their ‘bread and butter’ than building materials, it’s certainly still part of the business. It goes into the pit as well.
‘The pit’ she’s referring to is a cavernous hole not far from the processing plant, the size of many football fields. It’s the ‘(and Landfill)’ part of the ‘Eastern Creek Recycling and Ecology Park (and Landfill)’, and the part of the rubbish supply chain they’re less inclined to promote. Looking into it from above, a dozen or so trucks and excavators dumping, moving, and tooling amongst the rubbish look like an elaborate Lego set.
The woman tells me it’ll be full in about five years. “What happens then?” I ask.
It’s not confirmed, but apparently there’s a range of organisations and industries that might buy formerly contaminated land to build on.
“It could become a park, or a hospital,” she tells me, explaining there’s certain organisations and industries that are well-equipped to repurpose formerly contaminated land for a range of uses.
As I leave Eastern Creek, I’m cautiously heartened. While it may only represent a small portion of what’s happening with Australia’s waste overall, it feels good to have seen how seriously it’s being taken, and the efforts being made to take responsibility for our own rubbish.
The landfill pit at Eastern Creek Recycling facility. Consisting mostly of asbestos-contaminated building materials and general household waste, it will be full in five years.
***
When my husband arrives home that night, he asks about my visit to Eastern Creek, and whether I’ve uncovered “the giant rubbish scam”. I haven’t, but my amateur investigation into what’s happening in our rubbish system has left me equal parts appalled and inspired, and with many questions still unanswered.
If nothing else, I’ve learnt some important facts: Our rubbish doesn’t all end up in the same place, and what, when and how you dispose of your waste matters. In lieu of being able to change it all, changing your behaviour at home can absolutely help ease the waste burden on our land.
Also, plastic is poison. It’s the most difficult material to recycle, and (beyond asbestos), the one most likely to end up in landfill. We need to be working harder at all levels as a country to reduce our plastic reliance and consumption.
Perhaps most importantly, our attention matters. Asking questions matters. Knowing what happens when we throw something in the bin, matters.
It’s time we all did a lot more trash talking.
* Not their real names.
Main image by Prudence Tehan.
