Commingled bins cause contamination. Is it time to go for separate bins for glass and paper?

It was supposed to be the more efficient solution. Now as governments and local councils search for answers to Australia’s unfolding recycling crisis, the household yellow bin has emerged as both the prime culprit and a potential remedy.

The recycling industry has been in crisis mode since the beginning of the year. On 1 January, China stopped accepting 99% of Australia’s exported recycling due, in part, to their strict new rules on contamination.



One of the major causes of contamination is commingled recycling, which is used by 91% of Australian households and accounts for 60% of all household waste.

It varies from council to council but, in many Australian neighbourhoods, commingled recycling means all the paper, cardboard, glass and hard plastic goes into the same yellow bin together. There are exceptions of course: many provide a blue bin for paper and a green bin for organic waste.

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Jayne Paramor, from the environmental group Boomerang Alliance, says the commingled yellow bin (including paper) began in the late 90s as a way to cut down on costs, create an economy of scale in recycling and make recycling easier for households.

“It looked like a viable economic model to just put everything in one bin and separate it at a central location,” she says. “They decided it was more economical to use one truck to collect everything.”

But when everything goes in together, there is a high risk of contamination. For instance if a glass bottle shatters, it embeds itself in paper, making both unusable. If one household throws in a battery or a nappy, it contaminates the whole bin. And plastic bags, which are still frequently and erroneously put in the yellow bin, clog the recycling sorting machines.



“Commingling has made us complacent,” Paramor says. “The fact that we’ve got one bin and theoretically anything that can be recycled goes in – it means people see a recycling symbol on the back of the product and think ‘OK, that’s fine.’”

The solution could be to ditch commingling and switch to more separated bins. This is already the case in other countries. In Germany, for example, a highly separated bin system is the norm, with up to four different categories just for recycling: paper, plastic, organic and two kinds of glass – clear and coloured. The multi-part bins can be found at train stations, public parks and stadiums.

This could improve the quality of our recycling, Paramor says. “It’s almost a case of going back a step. We used to actually separate our paper out from our plastics and glass and tins. It was only about 10-15 years ago that that changed and [some councils] decided everything to go in one bin. That was when the problem started.”

Paramor and other environmental groups believe this new approach to recycling would allow us to dodge the effects of China’s ban in the short term. In the long term, more separated streams would make recycling cheaper to collect and sort.

They aren’t the only ones. In a recent Senate inquiry into recycling, the South Australian government recommended that a separated kerbside system results “in a much higher quality recyclable material than a single bin system”.

Who’s doing it already?

In Queensland, Ipswich local council has become the first council in Australia to respond to the crisis by ditching commingling.



The council came to it via an unexpected path. After China’s ban, Ipswich was one of the first councils to announce it would simply throw its recycling into landfill. But 48 hours of backlash later, the council switched to the opposite solution.



Since May, glass has been banned from all kerbside bins in Ipswich in a bid to simplify recycling.

The council has also banned lolly bags, bread bags, cereal box liners and frozen vegetable packets – essentially any thin plastic you can scrunch in your hand – from yellow bins.

Councillor David Morrison says it was a big change but one that was necessary to cut down on contamination.



Before the change, commingled bins were at 52% contamination and, under their current contract with recycling company Visy, any load with more than 25% contamination went straight to landfill.



Contamination was inevitable, Morrison says, because of the way kerbside garbage is collected.

“The glass doesn’t stand a chance. The truck has got to pick the bin up, it’s got to be tipped into the truck, the truck tips it out to a transfer pit, then a bulldozer pushes it into another truck. You’ve got 99.9% chance of the glass being shattered.

“After that, it’s very hard to separate. Visy is our contractor and they are very interested in the paper and the cardboard because they’ve got a paper mill near their recycling plant. Shattered or splintered glass is a real problem for them.



An audit of Ipswich’s bins, conducted in mid-June, found that average contamination had dropped to 24.58%. Morrison says the target is to get it below 15% and the audit results, as well as anecdotal evidence, demonstrates that they are getting there.

Ipswich is now asking waste companies across Australia to come up with a long-term solution. “By the end of the year, we might have a contractor who wants to give us a bin simply for glass,” Morrison says.



In the meantime, residents are dropping their glass off at recycling centres or putting it in the red-lidded waste bin. Then from 1 November, once Queensland’s container deposit scheme comes into effect, they can save them up for a 10c refund.

Morrison believes they are just the first to tackle the problem: “When other councils’ contracts mature, they will be facing the same problem we are facing, and will look to deal with it in similar ways”.



What happens next?

If commingling does end, Australians will have to learn exactly what is and isn’t recyclable.

Harry Wilson, the president of the Waste Contractors and Recyclers Association of NSW, told the Senate our reliance on China’s willingness to buy our waste had created a lax education system that implied everything went into the same bin.

“As an industry we pulled off the advertising and the education of the ratepayers over the last five or 10 years because of the acceptability of this product into China. I think that was a bad mistake by the whole industry ... We need to tell the public that some of these products aren’t recyclable.”

Paramor says Australians are generally very compliant when it comes to recycling. “It needs to be made easy. Years ago when [bins] were separated, it was just a case of we had three bins instead of two. It’s just a small step. A lot of people still remember when we did that and, if it is explained to them why we are going back to that, they will take it up with gusto.”

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Of course not everyone is going to do the right thing. “There are some people who unfortunately just don’t care,” Morrison says. “Don’t care if it goes into the yellow or red bin. There’s nappies in there and plastic bags. We want people to care. And if we find people who are not caring habitually, we’ll certainly have a talk to them. If they don’t care, we’ll take their recycling bin.”

Another significant issue is that products are increasingly made of commingled materials and mixed plastics. Paramor says this makes commingling an industry-wide issue and not just the responsibility of the kerbside recycler.

She offers the example of the average milk bottle that is made of three kinds of plastic: the soft clear bottle, the hard coloured lid and the thin plastic label. All are different and cannot be recycled at the same facility.



“If the [bottle manufacturer] stuck with clear plastic lids and put the product differentiation just on the labels, it would be a more effective way of ensuring it is actually recyclable. With the increased complexity of materials, we’re sort of victims of our own success in a way. We haven’t looked at the long term implications of that creativity.”



So why hasn’t this happened yet?

For many councils, cost is the biggest and final barrier. The Victorian Waste Management Association told the Senate that the commingled bin was developed “to provide the simplest and most efficient mechanism” and cut down costs.

“Infrastructure is now all geared to handle commingled recycling,” it said. “Separation at source requires significantly more resources and space and reduces the economics of the activity.”

Paramor says: “Cost is a big issue ... Especially as we see money being pulled out of local councils regularly these days. Money need to be put behind this and leadership needs to come from the top, the commonwealth government.

In the end, she says, commingling must also fit into other solutions, like the reduction of waste generation and the creation of a circular economy, where more of the recycling we use makes its way back into our products.

“We can create a self-contained model here that means we don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore,” Paramor says. “Once a few start to do it, the rest of them will realise. The early adopters are always the ones with the hard road.”