Great Recycling Challenge

Our community waste education team are conducting simple visual checks of kerbside waste, recycling and garden organics bins to maximise our community’s recycling efforts.

If your bin is checked, we will leave feedback on a tag attached to your bin handle to let you know how you can improve your recycling habits or kudos if you’re already doing a great job.

The Great Recycling Challenge follows the Western Australian Local Government Association’s (WALGA) guidelines for bin tagging. 
 

More than 2000 households across the City of Wanneroo have been randomly chosen to take part in the program.

We will only be checking the content of recycling, general waste and garden organics bins presented for collection in these specific areas. Each property selected to take part will be visited weekly over a six week period.
 

Selected households will receive a letter explaining the challenge with tags on household bins presented from 14 March 2022. 

Our community waste education team only have capacity to visit a certain number of households each day without disrupting the usual collection of your bins. For this reason, we are unable to allow residents to opt into the challenge.

If you aren’t selected this time around, don’t worry! We plan to conduct future challenges where you could be chosen to participate. In the meantime, you can show your support by continuing to sort your waste correctly.

If you would like to opt out of the Great Recycling Challenge, please email enquiries@wanneroo.wa.gov.au or call 9405 5000.

As recycling in Western Australia evolves, it’s even more important than ever to put the right things in the right bin. The City continues to communicate these changes in many ways from visits to schools, community workshops, waste and recycling guides sent direct to households, newspaper articles and social media campaigns.

We know our community is passionate about recycling and try their best to recycle correctly. However, we understand there is confusion about what can be recycled at home. A recent survey conducted by the City revealed that half of residents don’t feel like they receive enough information about waste and recycling.

This program aims to educate residents on how they can help reduce waste to landfill and improve recycling rates in the City of Wanneroo. This will save our ratepayers money as well as making our recycling stream stronger and more effective.

The Great Recycling Challenge will provide residents with tailored feedback on their recycling habits, whether you’re on the right track or how you can improve.

We record if resident bins present any type of contamination, the level of contamination, if it is at capacity or too full. This information is recorded against the property address and is being used to track improvement over time, so we can better manage and plan our kerbside collection services.

Additionally, it helps us to provide feedback to our community and encourage positive change around recycling habits.

This information is also used to determine residents’ eligibility to enter the prize draw. Names of prize winners are also recorded for our financial auditing requirements.

All information is kept in accordance with the City’s privacy policy.

With the changes to recycling in WA, our community is being encouraged to ‘leave it out of the recycling bin when in doubt’. Some people are concerned about contaminating their recycling bin and are putting recyclable items in their waste bin. 

Our staff will be checking the waste bin to see if there are recyclable items, and will let you know on the feedback tags.
 

Simply by sorting your waste correctly! Read more on sorting your waste to ensure your bins only contain acceptable materials.

Households that receive yellow smiley face ‘Thank You’ tags on their recycling or garden organics bins will automatically go into a daily draw to win a $100 Mastercard gift card for the first four weeks.

Any participating household that recycles correctly in weeks five and six will also be entered into the final draw to win one of five $410 cash prizes. 

If you live in a strata or multi-unit residence, please ensure your unit number clearly on your bin to help us identify you, so that we can include you in the lucky draw.

All winners will be contacted directly by phone, mail or email with instructions on how to claim their prize.

The tags have been printed on recycled paper and are able to be thrown into your yellow lid recycling bin.

The tags also provide a handy checklist of what items can be recycled, so you are also welcome to keep this tag for future reference.