Councils south of the river are winning the war on reducing waste to landfill, with East Fremantle, Melville, Cockburn and Fremantle all ranking among the top five recycling performers in the Perth metropolitan area.
Each of the top performing southern suburban councils sends its waste to the state-of-the-art Southern Metropolitan Regional Council’s Regional Resource Recovery Centre in Canning Vale.
The facility has consistently achieved above State Government targets by diverting more than 65 per cent of household waste from landfill, through its composting and recycling operations.
For the first time, waste and recycling data is available on the State Government’s MyCouncil website to encourage improved waste management performance among local councils.
The availability of the data contributes to the McGowan Government’s Our Priorities: Sharing Prosperity targets for waste by enabling local governments to benchmark their recovery performance against leading performers.
It also provides data for local government communities to better understand their waste footprint and assess progress towards a more sustainable and low-waste future.
The data, sourced from the Waste Authority’s annual Local Government Waste and Recycling Census, includes the quantities of waste collected, disposed to landfill and recovered by local governments for each type of waste service offered.
As stated by Local Government Minister David Templeman:
“Many local governments have already embarked on a journey with their community to change attitudes and behaviours to waste and are diverting waste from landfill.
“Making this data available in a central location on the MyCouncil website will improve transparency around local government waste performance and provide them with an increased incentive to improve their resource recovery performance.”
As stated by Environment Minister Stephen Dawson:
“Western Australians want to do the right thing when it comes to waste and by making this data publicly available, we can all work collaboratively to reduce waste generation.
“The McGowan Government’s Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Strategy 2030, launched earlier this year, gave a commitment to work closely with local governments to ensure all Perth and Peel households move to a three-bin Food Organics and Garden Organics system by 2025.
“As we roll this out we expect to see improved resource recovery in metropolitan
local governments that will be reflected each year on MyCouncil, helping us to meet the McGowan Government’s target of at least 75 per cent of waste generated in Western Australia to be reused or recycled by 2030.”
Top 10 metropolitan recyclers
| East Fremantle (Town) | 61% |
| Cockburn (City) | 61% |
| Melville (City) | 60% |
| Joondalup (City) | 55% |
| Fremantle (City) | 54% |
| Wanneroo (City) | 53% |
| Nedlands (City) | 52% |
| Cottesloe (Town) | 50% |
| Stirling (City) | 47% |
| Vincent (City) | 46% |
