Ararat Rural City Council has committed to developing new waste and recycling services for the community to improve its resource recovery.
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Councillors unanimously voted to adopt the new waste management strategy at their regular council meeting on Tuesday, February 23, with the council having no pre-existing waste management strategy.
At the meeting, Ararat Rural City Council chief executive Dr Tim Harrison was frank in evaluating the council's waste management record.
"This is fairly shocking, our poor performance as a community around resource recovery and recycling from our waste, and I think we need to take pretty serious steps to improve that," he said.
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"You're not the best council if you're not managing your waste properly, I think it's one of the chief tenets of local government."
Council's strategy will assist in the planning, procurement, and provision of waste and resource recovery services.
Dr Harrison said adopting the strategy would help the council start to make improvements.
"We've got a strategy here, now it's up to me and my people to make it real and do some good for the community over this," he said.
"This is an operational plan of changes to waste management. This provides us with the platform to get on with this work with."
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Council's newly adopted strategy lists several goals it seeks to achieve in the next five years.
These include overseeing a 20 per cent reduction in the amount of kerbside garbage produced per household, a 10 per cent increase in the quantity of kerbside recycling collected per household, and 40 per cent of businesses participating in the council's collection services.
Councillors were in agreement that the community's waste management needed to be overhauled.
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Cr Bob Sanders moved the motion to adopt the strategy and said he was pleased to see progress.
"We're way behind in this and it's very important that we get moving on it," he said.
"I think the way the CEO is tackling it is a really good start, and hopefully, in the next five years, we will see a massive difference in our waste disposal.
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