Recycling waste stacked at the fire-damaged Hume recycling facility before being trucked interstate. Photo: Claire Fenwicke.
Construction of a new recycling plant to replace the Hume facility destroyed in the Boxing Day fire of 2022 will start later this year and should be up and running some time in 2026.
Joint ACT and Federal Government funding of $26 million has been set aside for the facility, to be built on the same site in Hume and the adjoining block, where new technology will expand the ACT’s capacity to sort and process glass, plastic, paper and cardboard.
The government says the new facility will boost the amount of waste recovered by creating higher-quality recycled products and reducing the amount that ends up in landfill.
City Services Minister Tara Cheyne said a contract for the project was expected to be awarded in the coming months and it would take at least 18 months to build.
In the meantime, the ACT will continue sending the waste it can’t process interstate – from now on to Sydney – at a cost of $10 million a year.
Ms Cheyne said efforts were continuing to prevent batteries in the waste steam from causing another fire.
“We’ve put in a lot of measures and monitoring mechanisms to make sure that we’re not going to see something like we did again,” she said.
The government also rolled out community information campaigns, especially in the lead-up to Christmas last year, reminding Canberrans to dispose of batteries properly.
“We really ask people to not put them in recycling or in the bin because they can start fires,” she said.
“And we also know, of course, that if they’re charged with the wrong equipment, they can also cause issues.
“We’ve got a campaign that we’ll keep going to educate the community, but it’s an emerging issue for us, and it’s just very unfortunate that the ACT was one of the first to be affected in such a catastrophic way.”
The FOGO trial will be extended, but Canberrans won’t see a full service until at least 2026. Photo: Chris Steel Facebook.
The Budget will also fund an expansion of the Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) pilot in Belconnen.
Ms Cheyne said this would provide more information about how households in different types of multi-unit developments would use a FOGO service.
The pilot currently services 5300 households in Belconnen, Bruce, Cook and Macquarie, and an additional 1150 units will be added.
“Our housing mix, even since 2020 when we first announced FOGO, has changed dramatically and continues to evolve,” Ms Cheyne said.
“One of the challenges that we know we have with any waste stream is with our multi-unit developments, so we’re going to be expanding the FOGO pilot to another 1150 unit households to get a better understanding of what we need to be doing differently to make sure that FOGO is going to be working for every housing type in the ACT community.”
Ms Cheyne could not say when a full service would be operating in the ACT, but the Budget did allow for the start of a two-stage procurement process.
“I live in an apartment in the Belconnen Town Centre and we don’t have FOGO yet either, so that weighs on me as well, but I do know other apartment blocks that do have FOGO and have responded to it really well and we do look forward to continuing to roll it out,” she said.
A FOGO facility for the entire ACT will have to wait until the new recycling plant is up and running.
After the Hume fire, the government decided to delay the project to focus on fast-tracking the new recycling facility.
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