Manning the stall at the Bridge Mall Farmers Market on Saturday were councillors Ben Taylor and Amy Johnson, helping to get the message out about recycling.
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While people young and old had a go at a mini-recycling challenge, they handed out fact sheets about what types of plastics can be recycled.
Contaminated recycling is a massive issue - the cleaner the waste is, the more that can be done with it, and for much cheaper.
Cr Taylor was keen to encourage people to continue recycling, despite recent media attention on the industry's woes, adding the City of Ballarat was continuing to push the state government to fund its All Waste Interchange Facility.
"We don't want to just bury stuff in the ground, we want to make sure there's a good process and it gets utilised," he said.
"(The state government) has got half a billion dollars sitting in their sustainability fund, doing nothing, let's put it to some real work and start getting some of this stuff out of landfill and into proper streams so we can actually process it and do something good for the environment.
"We've said, let's put our money where our mouth is, we've allocated the money (for the All Waste Interchange), we're in the process of buying land and building a shed to put it all in, but we need support from the state and even some private funding to help us to get the equipment in there and set it all up."
He added there were already businesses in Ballarat that were using recycled plastics to make street furniture and bollards around the city.
However, while council can lead new initiatives, it comes down to the grassroots efforts from residents themselves - so the amount of people stopping by was also a positive sign, Cr Johnson said.
"We've had a huge amount of interest this morning, people are genuinely interested in getting better at recycling," she said.
"It'd be great to get to the stage, as a city, where our waste is actually a resource we can sell, which would reduce the cost burden on ratepayers."
Amy's top five recycling tips:
- If plastic returns to its shape after it's scrunched up, it can probably be recycled
- The cleaner the waste, the better, but don't waste water on jars
- Boxes for juice and stock can't be recycled
- Only recycle intact glass, not broken glass
- Don't put tin cans full of cigarette butts in the recycling bin
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