March 2021 Update

Thank you for your feedback so far on Council's recycling and waste management services. We received 326 responses to our community wide survey over November & December. Some of the findings include:

• Most respondents were from urban areas (Goonellabah, Lismore) but some also from villages (Nimbin & Dunoon) with a kerbside collection service, with residents from rural areas having different practices and challenges with their waste management.
• Most respondents make the effort to avoid waste, reuse, compost and recycle, however the main deterrents to recycling were confusion about what can and cannot be recycled, not having a kerbside collection and limited access to drop-off/recycling centres and a lack of confidence in the recycling industry that recyclable content is in fact recycled.
• Most respondents preferred Council to continue the current level of waste and recycling services and didn’t want to pay more for services
• The top 5 initiatives people would like to see in a new waste strategy were:
  1. Supporting circular economy projects, e.g. reusing products and packaging.
  2. Investigating other landfill diversion technologies
  3. Assisting local businesses and building partnerships to develop and implement recycling programs and industries.
  4. Upgrading and expanding the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF).
  5. Targeted community education programs.

Following on from the survey, over 50 people participated in two focus group workshops in early March and explored in more detail the current situation as well as the positives and negatives of various directions for the future.

Next Steps

We will be presenting the outcomes from the focus group workshops to Council at a briefing at 6:00pm on Tuesday 20 April 2021.

The timeline for the development of the strategy has been delayed until later in the year. This is due to the need for more consultation with our business community and the release of NSW Government’s draft 20-year Waste Strategy which is expected to be available by May 2021.

We plan to present the draft Lismore Waste and Recycling strategy to Council in October 2021 before placing it on public exhibition for further feedback. We will provide an update closer to this time about how you can review the draft strategy.