Goya Dmytryshchak
A decision to return to weekly garbage collection dominated last week’s Hobsons Bay council meeting.
Joint letters for and against changing from fortnightly back to weekly rubbish bin collection were tabled, and a number of questions from the public were asked.
The council last year cut the weekly garbage collection to fortnightly and introduced a four-bin system to separate general waste, mixed recyclables, glass, and food and green waste.
In June, a four-three councillor majority voted to reinstate the weekly garbage bin collection.
At last week’s meeting, a joint letter on the council’s decision to reinstate weekly garbage collections, signed by nine people, requested that council share the results of the kerbside waste and recycling service review with the community.
Cr Peter Hemphill said the signatories were “worried about the switch sending us backwards as far as our environmental sustainability, and I also share their concerns”.
A second joint letter, signed by 33 people, requested that council implement its resolution to reinstate weekly general waste collections as quickly as possible and provide communication about the implementation before the end of August. The letter also requested that council commit to gaining ISO 14001:2015 certification by the end of 2022.
Deputy Mayor Daria Kellander said the ISO 14001 was an internationally agreed standard “to assist companies in continually improving their environment and performance”.
She told the meeting that the majority wanted a weekly garbage collection.
“The greater part of a number of different questions’ [respondents in councils’ surveys] wanted weekly garbage,” Cr Kellander said.
“The greater part of council, being four councillors out of seven, voted for in favour of weekly garbage collection.”
Cr Hempill disagreed.
“I do have some difficulty with claims in there that the majority of residents want weekly general waste collection,” Cr Hemphill said.
During public question time, Rowena Joske asked if the council’s survey responses indicated a majority of residents wanted weekly garbage collection.
Mayor Jonathon Marsden responded that the survey asked two specific questions about frequency.
He said one question asked which bin residents would choose to either increase the frequency or upsize, without considering costs, with the weekly service the most popular answer in both the random-sample, statistically-significant telephone survey and the opt-in online surveys.
He said 35.1 per cent of random-sample and 37.8 per cent of opt-in survey respondents, respectively, preferred this option.
“For the question of general frequency preferences taking indicative costs into account, just over half, that is 52 per cent, of the random sample survey respondents preferred the current system of a small 120-litre general rubbish bin collected fortnightly,” Cr Marsden said
“One fifth, that is just a bit more than 20 per cent, preferred a large bin collected fortnightly and 14.4 preferred a small bin collected weekly.
“In the opt-in online survey, the largest number of respondents also preferred the current system: 34.4 per cent.
Cr Marsden said 11.6 per cent of the opt-in survey respondents preferred a weekly service at a cost of $40 to $45.
“A third question related to satisfaction with the current frequency, and for this 30 per cent of the random-sample survey respondents were dissatisfied with the fortnightly service and 50 per cent of the opt-in online survey’s respondents were dissatisfied with the fortnightly service,” he said.
