Why Are My Recycling and General Waste Bins Emptied Into the Same Truck?

Hello and welcome to another edition of Recycle, Don't Be A Wister, which is of course one of the leading recycling podcasts in Australia and internationally thankfully. So in today's podcast we're going to cover basically I suppose it's a question or a complaint even that someone made to us recently and as you probably know, we're sure we provide waste recycling to small companies and I suppose because we do this podcast because of our business ethos we pride ourselves on recycling being honest, you know, doing what it says on the tin to quote the old advert and providing not greenwashing but being accured in what we sell, accured in how we describe things and yeah so I suppose we had a question recently from a customer who will not a question they actually sent through a cancellation to us because they had seen with their own eyes like garbage truck go on site and empty a general waste of red bin and then immediately emptied a yellow commingled recycling bin into the same truck and so obviously they thought this meant that it was greenwashing and we were bluffing and that recycling was all not accurate, not it wasn't truthful and that we were just dumping it all in landfill anyway. So I suppose we want to go through in this podcast like honesty then that's not what we want to hear and we want as a company and we want to I suppose put people's minds at rest that yes we do recycle stuff. So I suppose firstly this is unusual this does not happen very often but sometimes it does happen. There are scenarios where it happens when recycling is not available and this is this is when it was not this scenario in this case but it does happen when fundamentally if a recycling facility is closed or not accessible and this can happen when there was if you remember a couple of years ago there was a fire in in Melburn in some of the recycling plants and the commingled recycling facilities were available. So of course this can happen from time to time. In other scenarios this can happen if trucks are broken down if there's a shortage of trucks I'm talking here around the edge scenarios the very unusual cases when it's just a logistics issue and that can happen one time out of a hundred when there's no one else can do the empty the service and just to get rid of the customers' waste then we'll take it as general waste and of course in that scenario it does go to landfill but that is a very small percentage for the reasons that we will go through. So as I suppose what's happening is if a garbage company or a recycling company was actually dumping recyclable materials at landfill that would be fundamentally commercially in seen just even from a selfish you know cash perspective because recycling is much more cash effective or cheaper than landfilling due to the landfill levy and also the recycling the value that is in many recycling products. So for example in Sydney or Melbourne if you wanted to dump it landfill you would have to pay a get rid to get into the facility and dump it which would probably be around about three hundred dollars per ton so you would be in a very quick last mix situation so in this podcast we'll go through I suppose discuss this topic in more depth. The first thing is collection is only part of the process so that is the only part that people see on site and then from there it enters the truck and it goes somewhere else. In the waste business we separate waste general waste generated two categories dry and wet waste and wet waste or potrassable waste is fundamentally stuff that contains food waste or green waste or something that can rot away and deteriorate where a dry waste will be like in many ways it's an extended version of what cubby and your commingled so a cubby item such as cardboard, office paper, plastic packaging, drink bottles, aluminium cans, shrink wrap and pallets. Obviously lots of this can be recycled if it's done properly so hopefully cardboard should be going into a cardboard bin, plastic packaging, drink bottles, aluminium cans, they should be going into a commingled bin and there are services available for shrink wrap if it's in significant quantities but obviously that doesn't always happen and general waste is often intermingled with items that are recyclable. Food waste is a different category because it smells, be it gets onto everything and see it's generally not recyclable or separatable in most facilities. That's in 2026 there are facilities where you can recycle some food waste but that's it makes things much more difficult. So what happens with the waste? So I suppose you think about a commingled bin which is the yellow bin and that is if you're used to it at your house or in your commercial in your business pickups that is you don't buy it you just put it straight into the bin and the reason for that is that it has to be separated when it gets the facility. So that's what a waste is bottles cans containers etc that go to what is called a Merf or material recovery facility. If you think of dry general waste that is sort of like a commingled bin you know on steroids or exaggerated so it has generally some of those components and also other things that are not easily recyclable or easily break separatable and so that dry general waste can it contains often a certain percentage of things that are commingled waste and then a certain percentage of things that usually are included in general waste. So when it goes into the truck all commercial collections in Australia are pretty much run with a commercial focus i.e. to make profits and so it is in the company's logistical and operational best interest to separate any waste that can and recycle that and get a fee from a recycler and then minimize what is general waste and with that general waste minimize it as much as possible and then dispose of it at landfill with the follow-on is that when you go to landfill you will pay a gate rate which is in Metro Sydney it's now I'm looking here at the gate or the tonnage the life of levy alone is a hundred and eighty dollars per ton but then there's also fees for the actual use of facility so let's assume around 320 or so dollars per ton so clearly it's in anyone's interest to reduce the amount of waste that is going to landfill and people do that by recycling it. So if we think about what goes into commingled and we've covered this ad nausea am I suppose on some of our podcasts that some items are much more easy to recycle than others and the value of some items is clearly more realizable first of all it's higher and secondly it's more realizable for some other items so clearly cardboard look the visiampara one of the richest families in Australia was built fundamentally on cardboard and that's an internationally traded material so companies will try to strip that out as much as possible and of course aluminium which goes into cans that again I think we've covered in some podcasts that Australia uses circa 10% of all its electricity usage just to produce aluminium from boxide so it's clearly in our interest to recycle aluminium cans etc and I think everyone's used to that from you know being even being at school and collecting them and then obviously certain plastics can be recycled as well so the way people do that is when it's is a mixed or commingled or a general dried waste it can go to what's called a murph which is an acronym for or a three letter abbreviation that means materials recovery facility and this is sort of a facility that is as big as a football pitch with a lot of what are sort of technology that looks like it's out of a Wallace and Gromit movie where it's you know almost the string science science fiction style trommels and pathways and elevators etc were material is dumped in one end and then it's separated using a series of pretty much mechanical methodologies to separate it out into materials that could be more easily recyclable so generally it comes in and it's dumped on a on a conveyor belt people with with very protective gloves will try to separate our items beforehand that they can see with you know with the rise as it moves past and then it goes through a whole series of of a of a probably ingenious separation methods so the first are what called trommel screams with trommel screens which are large rotating drums which separate materials by size it would they go into more screens with separate flat paper and cardboard from balls and containers and then it goes into what are called ballistic separators which you know isn't as exciting as it sounds but fundamentally it relies on movement and gravity and the fact that different sizes and shapes and weights of materials move differently when falling and so with that methodology you can separate out flat materials ruling containers or heavy objects after that they go through magnets and the magnet obviously will separate out metals and steel in particular and then you have other things such as eddy current separators which use magnetic fields to eject aluminium cans and other non-ferrous non-steve metals then this is this is probably the part that's less likely or less wadley implemented in 2026 and certainly not in all facilities are optical disorders they use infrared cameras to identify different plastics in very short to visit time much quicker than a human can. And then these air jets just separate out PET plastic, HDP, polypropylene and clear plastics. And I'm admittedly that it's less likely to occur than in some of the things we've imagined previously. Then you have air classifiers which use control air flow to separate light materials like paper and plastic film from heavier items. And obviously people are watching this the whole way through the process. They're using very protective loads because obviously broken glasses, there could be anything in this stuff. And with that you can get separation percentages up to above 50% from certainly from dry, high quality general waste. And then you can reduce the cost of disposing for it. From, first of all, less or say $300 per ton, you get that down to a net $150 of the per tonnage that enters the facility. And then in many cases you will get money back for the actual recyclable materials. So you can all sell the cardboard. You can all sell aluminium. And to some extent depending on the plastics, you might be able to own sell some of that. So the takeaway for here is that in certain instances, companies do collect bins on certain runs if it's dry, general waste, and if it's commingled, they may put it into the same truck and it'll be separated out of the facility. There are not many of the facilities that do this. We utilize a couple. In Sydney there's a company called Doyle Brothers in the inner west and they have a government that received multiple grounds to build a facility that does this. And they use it also to produce what's called, I'll turn the fuel so that some of this very high calorific, plastic waste can be burned to produce high intensity but long burning fuel for places such as cement killings and other industrial purposes. And this is more efficient obviously than using new, than dumping that at landfill or then purchasing other carbon fuels such as coal or gas. So the net benefit to the environment is significant. The important thing to remember here is that in most cases, general waste is picked up separately but sometimes, I think actually we will see more and more of this over time as these facilities, like we're seeing as opposed to councils, we're often seeing more bins that were being pressured into separating our waste on the street but in another way we're seeing especially as AI comes in, especially as barcodes and other, I suppose, technological where separating materials, like you see it even at the supermarket, anyone who remembers when the automatic checkouts began, they didn't automatically detect if you put a red onion versus like a carrot versus some lames on the checkered thing. Now a lot of them will detect that automatically and that is also happening in the world of recycling so that, like I expect what will happen is in the future, we probably put everything in one bin, everything will get taken away into the one facility, it will be separated out. That probably will keep cardboard shabbered because keeping a drain makes it much more efficient. But I think that's what we'll probably see. We'll probably see a reduced number of bin services. And certainly dry, general waste and coalmingle, I think over time will become, you know, when bland into the same thing. And that would mean fewer trucks on the road, less bins missed or fewer bins missed and less emissions, et cetera, and reduce traffic and metal regions. So I think that's a good thing. I think, you know, we're not trying to greenwash stuff. There are instances when people do the wrong thing. There are instances when people try to cover a problem that is, let's say, a broken down truck and they prioritize helping out a customer not leaving bin stacking up in their area. So they might just absorb the cost and do it that way. But that generally is a very short term thing because over the long term, if you are, you know, charging more for general than you are for coalmingle and you're dumping coalmingle in a general facility than you're clearly losing money. So that doesn't make much sense for anyone or any operator who wants to be in the game long term. So I think it's interesting. We'll share on the blog some videos of these material, recovery facilities. I know that some of them are open for visits from school groups and other, you know, council groups, et cetera. And they are pretty interesting. There are some cases that might smell a bit. But they certainly are interesting and it's nice to see how the whole system works. So yeah, we'll leave it there today and I will wish you all, yeah, a nice week ahead. And remember, recycle. Don't be a weister.