Tess Sapia from the Onkaparinga Council spoke with our group, answered our many questions, facilitated a garbage game, and gave out some stickers and hand outs.
It was an excellent evening, and for those who were unable to attend, I wanted to pass on this information:

Recycling Facts that you might not know -

These can be recycled in our yellow bins -
All hard plastic is now recyclable regardless of the number on the base. Anything that you cannot crush in your hands is accepted including ice cream containers, and yoghurt tubs.

These get reused or go into the red rubbish bin -
Small snap off type yoghurt containers that usually come in packs of 4.
Strawberry & cherry tomato containers, and the inserts of biscuit and cake packets.
Polystyrene trays that often contain meat products.
Did you know that all lids must be removed? This allows the containers to be compressed into a cube for transport; workers at Solo otherwise have to manually remove the lids! These lids need to go in the waste bin, unfortunately they cannot be recycled, the small ring that is left on the neck of the bottle is OK.

These Cannot be put in yellow bins but can be recycled -
Mobile phones, compact fluoro globes, and all batteries can go to the Willunga Environment centre.
All plastic bags cannot go in the yellow bin, but Coles and Woolies will take them.
Aluminium that can be easily crushed such as foil, pie tins, yoghurt lids, takeaway containers and chocolate wrappers cannot be recycled by Solo, so please leave out of the yellow bin. However, Chas M will take them, so collect them and place them in the bin provided in Sue E’s carport or leave with Jacqui G.

It is important to get it right because if the driver notices contamination as s/he tips the load into the truck, a decision is made to take the truck straight to landfill. So we can have an impact on the entire truck load going to the right place! Some of the contamination received includes the following:  food, clothing, basket balls, bags, electrical cords, & hoses, the last two are very hazardous to the recycling plant as they can become caught up in the machinery!
Onkaparinga's contamination rate is 15-24% at present.

Food Waste
Onkaparinga Council sells worm farms and compost bins "at cost" passing on the savings to the consumer, (cheaper than Bunnings) to encourage backyard composting and recycling. The council is very keen to reduce food waste going to landfill; apparently 50% of household waste (in the red bins) is food. (Yes they do bin audits!) If you must throw out food, because it is not suitable for your compost/chooks/wormfarm, it is much better to put it in your green waste bin, as this goes straight to Peats Soils in Willunga to be composted.

Bridget - for WMG

Hi everyone,

Let’s start recycling our aluminium foil and food containers rather than putting them into the general waste stream.

Please put suitable items (see below) into the green bin with black lid labelled “Aluminium” in my carport. I will pass them on to Chas Martin who is running a collection scheme.

Below is a message from Chas that explains why and what to recycle this way.

Sue Eltahir - 24 Dianella Way - 8556 6441

Chas writes:
I have been collecting aluminium materials for fundraising for Friends of Willunga Basin (F.O.W.B.) for 3 years now for the following reasons: Although aluminium is a very energy intensive material to produce, it is not covered by kerbside recycling unless it is a container deposit item, so if it goes to landfill there is a lot of energy wasted. The embodied energy in a 5 gram meat pie dish is 1⁄4 of a killowatt hour. The electricity taken to produce 1 killogram of aluminium from ore is of the order of 50 killowatt hours, but it takes less than 10% of that to recycle aluminium.

The price of salvaged aluminium is low because of the outrageous subsidies via super low electricity prices to aluminium refiners. I feel that by recycling our aluminium we can highlight the issues involved, minimize our own carbon footprint from using this material and make a bit of income for community groups.

The photo below shows some of the items which are suitable. As a general guide if you scrunch it up and it holds the crumpled state it is suitable. If it mostly bounces back it is probably a plastic and unsuitable. Whilst recycling aluminium is good, reducing its use where possible is even better.

Remember it takes approximately one whole unit of electricity (1Kg carbon emission) to produce the aluminium for the takeaway dinner containers for one person for one meal if it is produced from alumina. Put another way, if you have a 1 Killowatt solar array feeding into the grid, those containers take equivalent to about 1/6 of your daily electricity output. Aluminium is extremely undervalued if we consider the very high energy cost (i.e., fossil carbon release) per kg to produce it. A carbon tax would give it its proper value and dramatically increase recycling rates.


Examples: Pie plate, food tray, coffee tin sealer, tops of yoghurt containers, chocolate wrappers, small bottle caps

Can you believe that this photo (below) is of Port Willunga Jetty?  It is an undated photograph that I found on the City of Onkaparinga library website where they are progressively digitising all old photos of the council area.  There are some fascinating pictures of the Onkaparinga River in flood and families on ‘our’ beach  wearing clothes that I am glad are not required any more! See: http://www.onkaparingacity.com/libraries/localstudies/index.asp

Jenni M