East Waste is Council’s waste services provider managing kerbside collections and recyclables.
The collapse of SKM Recycling has raised concerns around Australia for the state of resource recycling, especially recycling resources collected from kerbsides.
East Waste is no longer in a contract with SKM so the City of Burnside will not be affected by the collapse of SKM.
Your recycling material collected since September last year does not and will not go to landfill.
Current and future
Throughout the recycling crisis, East Waste took timely and responsible action to safeguard the integrity of its recycling and advance the interests of the Member Councils – Adelaide Hills Council, City of Burnside, Campbelltown City Council, City of Norwood, Payneham & St Peters, City of Mitcham and the Corporation of the Town of Walkerville.
East Waste was one of the first, if not the first, to terminate its recycling contract with SKM in September 2018 when it became concerned for the future viability of the SKM business model and its response to China Sword.
For the past 12 months, all East Waste material has been sent to the local council-owned resource processor, the Northern Adelaide Waste Management Authority (NAWMA). This means that everything delivered to NAWMA by East Waste has been processed without stockpiling. Furthermore, the majority of sorted material was sold for secondary reprocessing in Australia.
East Waste has just struck a long-term contract with NAWMA that provides transparency on the destination of all East Waste recycling. The contract stipulates processing of material within a week of it being presented to NAWMA.
As a member of East Waste, our community are at the forefront nationally of kerbside recycling resource recovery and processing. The East Waste contract with NAWMA is the first such contract since China Sword last year triggered the recycling crisis around the world. China severely restricted all imports of recycling, meaning that everyone in Australia had to find other solutions.
The past
East Waste had a contract with SKM until September 2018. When SKM opened in South Australia, it had a sound and market competitive business model that included building a Material Recovery Facility (MRF) for local processing. External influences of fires and China Sword caused delays and some East Waste recycling was stockpiled locally – of which we were aware – and in Victoria.
Throughout this period, East Waste engaged closely with the Environment Protection Authority in South Australia to understand risks and how they were being managed. The EPA allowed SKM to continue. This afforded East Waste a level of confidence up until a year ago.
East Waste has not sent any material to SKM in the past 12 months. We don’t know how much material stored at SKM’s sites at Wingfield or in Victoria originated from the Member Councils.
Today (27 August), the Victorian Government announced a $10 million loan to the receivers of SKM for the processing of stockpile material. This means that all the stockpiled material in Victoria, including any that may originate from East Waste Member Councils, will be processed and will not go to landfill.
