Victorian Councils Close the Recycling Loop this National Recycling Week

November 16, 2017

Hands up who makes a conscious effort to recycle all their paper, plastic, and glass?

The good news is 98 per cent of Australian say they actively recycle their household waste. Recycling our waste is all well and good, but if we’re not choosing recycled products over new, we’re only doing half the job. Choosing recycled products is a vital step in ‘closing the recycling loop’.

Closing the recycling loop calls on everyone to make greener choices, and it’s not limited to the home or office. In fact, your local council has an enormous role to play in closing the recycling loop to protect our planet. Simply collecting the glass, plastic, and paper you put out every fortnight is not enough. Our local councils need to be investing in recycled products, too.

This National Recycling Week, we’re commending the municipalities across Victoria who are paving the way towards greener cities by choosing Green Roads recycled construction materials over quarried natural resources.

Green Roads by Alex Fraser reduces construction and demolition waste, reuses thousands of tonnes of glass collected from Victorian households each week.

Every year, our state-of-the-art recycling facilities across Melbourne and Brisbane recycle more than 3 million tonnes of waste materials into high-quality products under tight specifications overseen by VicRoads and Transport and Main Roads in Queensland.

These high-quality recycled construction materials are then sold on to environmentally conscious local councils for use in building and maintaining the roads and pavements you use every day. Millions of tonnes of recycled construction materials are also being used to build major infrastructure projects – like roads, bridges, pavements, and ports.

Hats off to the many local councils across Victoria who have chosen to use Green Roads Recycled construction materials to build and maintain their cities.

This week alone, central-local government areas like Stonnington, Yarra, Brimbank, and Hume have chosen recycled roadbase over quarried natural resources. While regional councils, such as Macedon Ranges, Frankston, Cardinia and Casey have chosen Green Roads Asphalt, containing up to 40% recycled content. Growth areas like Greater Dandenong, Kingston and Melton are choosing construction material containing the recycled glass they once collected from their residents’ wheelie bins. From Mornington Peninsula to Murrindindi, Whittlesea to Wyndham your local councils are helping to close the loop this National Recycling Week.

The positive environmental impact of choosing recycled construction materials goes far beyond our local areas, with many major asset owners and contractors actively seeking better, smarter and greener products for their major infrastructure projects, such as  City Tulla Widening, Peninsula Link, Webb Dock West and EastLink – to name a few.

We urge everyone involved in the development and maintenance of infrastructure to consider their role in closing the recycling loop. By choosing Green Roads recycled construction materials you will help:

• Reduce landfill
• Reduce carbon footprint of your project by 65%;
• Reduce truck traffic by 30%; and
• Reduce quarrying of precious natural resources by 110%.

National Recycling Week is a fantastic initiative founded by Planet Ark in 1996 to educate and stimulate change by giving people the tools they need to minimise waste and manage resources responsibly at home, work and school. If you would like to know more, check out: http://recyclingweek.planetark.org/