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What can you recycle on a building site?
With much of the construction industry embracing the philosophy of ‘green building’ there’s growing pressure on building site managers to get serious about recycling. More than 90% of construction and demolition waste can be recycled – everything from concrete rubble and steel reinforcing to timber offcuts and bits of PVC pipe – but the diversity of waste can create a bit of a challenge for building site managers who want to maximise their recycling performance. Good news: for several type…
How do I recycle white goods?
White goods are large electrical items used in the home and yep, you guessed it, they are often white in colour. To be a bit more specific, white goods comprise refrigerators, washing machines, clothes dryers, ovens and stovetops, microwave ovens and air conditioners. On the one hand, they are attractive objects for recycling because they contain a lot of steel, aluminium and copper that can be extracted and reused. On the other hand, they are often big and heavy and hard to fit into yo…
How Australian schools can dispose of and recycle e-waste
The dark side of the glittering screens that school teachers and students rely on is that they eventually fail or become obsolete. They then add to the mountain of electrical and electronic waste (e-waste), much of which ends up being dumped into landfill. Aside from things with screens – computers, tablets, phones, calculators, TVs – schools also depend on fluorescent lighting tubes and compact fluorescent lamps, photocopiers, batteries, power tools, lab equipment and numerous other elect…
How Ecocycle is working closely with Indonesia to tackle mercury recycling
With more than 260 million people, Indonesia is the world’s fourth largest by population. It’s also developing rapidly, and much of its economic activity is illuminated my mercury-containing fluorescent lighting. Indonesia is also home to significant oil and gas extraction industries that generate mercury-bearing waste, and artisanal gold mining remains a major cause of mercury poisoning. Ecocycle, Australia’s most experienced and only fully licensed recycler of mercury, is now working …
Should Australia have a mandatory e-waste recycling program?
E-waste can be defined as anything with a power cord or battery that has reached the end of its useful life. It may still be in working order, but rendered obsolete by new technology. Just take a look around your home, workplace and local shopping centre and you’ll see thousands of items that are all destined to become e-waste: ovens and fridges, computers and phones, light globes and fluorescent tubes, hair dryers and power tools, remote controls and the occasional electric vehicle. E-…
What can museums and galleries recycle?
Museums and galleries play a vital role in preserving our greatest treasures. Entirely consistent with their commitment to protecting the natural and artistic riches of our past is the responsibility of minimising their own contribution to ongoing environmental harm. A key component in achieving that goal is the implementation of effective recycling programs. Museum and gallery managers will be well acquainted with the usual recyclables such as paper and cardboard, along with other high…
Victorian Government announces date for ban on e-waste being sent to landfill
First announced in 2015, Victoria’s ban on disposal of e-waste to landfill recently moved a step closer. After extensive consultation with the community, councils and the recycling industry, the state government announced that the e-waste ban will commence on 1 July 2019. The ban involves both regulatory measures (e.g. rules that ban the disposal of e-waste in landfill and specify how it is to be handled) and non-regulatory measures, such as upgrades to the e-waste collection network and a…
How do I recycle old TVs?
Recent years have seen major advances in the technology behind television. Gone are the old, bulky TV sets with many models today being not much thicker than a sheet of glass. Advances in transmission technology have also matched the evolution of screen technology – it’s all digital these days. These twin drivers of technological obsolescence have generated a deluge of old televisions, many of which are left on nature strips to be vandalised, or dumped into landfill. Either way, that…
How do I safely recycle old hard drives?
When talking about the safe recycling of old computer hard drives there are three main issues to consider. Fortunately, they all have the same simple solution. Cyber safety Your old hard drive may contain a lot of information about you or your business, and obviously you don’t want your financial, health, corporate and personal information ending up in the wrong hands. It isn’t enough to just delete files, and even reformatting your hard drive may not prevent an expert from recovering yo…
Ecocycle provides recycling certificates to confirm safe destruction of e-waste, mercury-containing products
When you recycle with Ecocycle you can be assured that your waste will be processed to the highest standards of environmental and human safety. For additional reassurance, we provide recycling certificates on request. But what is a recycling certificate and why might you want one? A recycling certificate clearly documents what you have done to dispose of your waste in an environmentally sound manner. It details the type of waste that we receive from you (e.g. e-waste, fluorescent tub…
Should Australia introduce a blanket national waste levy?
In an attempt to boost recycling rates, many states across Australia have introduced waste levies. Collected on behalf of state governments by the operators of landfill sites, levies are an additional fee paid by dumpers on top of the usual disposal charges. Depending on the state, the origin of the waste (city or country) and the material involved, most levies fall in the range of $50 to $150 per tonne. The idea is that, by making landfill more expensive as a disposal option, recycling…
Does Tasmania have Australia’s worst waste system?
According to the Tasmanian Government’s submission to the Senate enquiry into the waste and recycling industry in Australia, the state generated over 636,000 tonnes of solid waste in the 2015-2016 year. Just 35% was recovered for recycling or composting, and Tasmania does not have a legislated waste levy. This has led to comparisons to the situation in Queensland, where the lack of a waste levy has been blamed for the Sunshine State becoming a dumping ground for interstate waste. While …
How to overcome objections to recycling in bigger business
Some large businesses can be more bureaucratic than governments. That can make it difficult to implement new ways of doing things, such as comprehensive recycling programs. On the plus side, when a really big company embraces a course of positive action, it can achieve more good than a hundred or a thousand smaller businesses. The question is: how can one person influence the direction of a large organisation? Here are some ideas. Understand your company’s environmental policy. Someti…
Seafood lovers eating oceans of mercury
The amount of plastic we consume from our seafood has been in the news lately, but long before anyone even considered the problem of marine plastic we were poisoning our seafood, and ourselves, with a far more toxic and persistent pollutant – mercury. We may not witness mass mercury poisoning on the scale of Minamata disease anymore, but in the United States more than 5% of women of childbearing age have blood mercury levels that put their children at risk of suffering from neurodevelopmental…
How government rebates help drive recycling initiatives
We have a long way to go in achieving a perfect recycling rate, and one way in which governments can help boost recycling is by providing rebates for particular activities. And, as it happens, recycling doesn’t even need to be the primary target of the rebates involved. Save energy, boost recycling Several state governments operate rebate-based schemes that help householders and businesses become more efficient in their use of energy. The main schemes are: Victorian Energy Efficiency T…
How can I recycle my old computer?
Australia has a pretty poor record when it comes to recycling computers. Only about 10% get recycled, (and only about 1% of TVs), which adds up to a lot of electronic waste (e-waste) going to landfill. It defies common sense. At the point in the product life cycle when it is easiest and cheapest to recover the maximum value from waste, computers get mixed in with all sorts of other stuff and dumped in a hole in the ground. The big problem then is that toxic-heavy metals, including le…
Tasmanian regulators turn attention to mercury levels in water
Many Tasmanian dentists may be unaware that they are defined as “commercial trade waste generators”. The problem is dental amalgam. EPA Tasmania regulated that, from 1 October 2008, dental practices must employ dental amalgam separators. Since then, dentists have been required to keep mercury waste out of waterways, so the installation of amalgam separators in dental practices has been mandatory for more than 8 years. Yet, through a combination of lack of awareness among the dental profess…
Why receptionists hold the power to drive recycling initiatives in Australian businesses
As a receptionist you’ll often know more about what is going on in a business than most employees (maybe even more than the boss). Each day you greet your colleagues and clients, delivery people and service providers. You answer the phone, and may even screen calls (particularly those annoying sales ones). On top of that you may be the office administrator, photocopier expert, and manager of the office stationery cabinet. What’s this got to do with recycling? Well, for one thing, you’ll…
How Ecocycle works with other recycling companies and programs
The recycling industry is a bit like an ecosystem. It’s made up of a wide range of ‘species’, each of which occupies its own niche, eating a particular type of ‘food’ and producing waste that is ‘food’ for other ‘species’. In the recycling ecosystem the ‘species’ are companies, government departments and other organisations. ‘Food’ is the recyclable materials and, in a perfect recycling ecosystem, there is no waste – just further raw materials that other species can use. Just as in a na…
Why recycling programs in schools are so important in driving change
The lessons we learn in school can lay the habits of a lifetime, and among the more important lessons we can teach our children is the nitty-gritty of recycling. Recycling needn’t be an add-on to the day’s learning. It can be easily integrated into a range of subjects, with its practical and hands-on nature helping to provide relevance to topics that many students may find a bit abstract. Existing programs a good start There is plenty of support available. For example, Zero Waste South Aust…
Australian businesses that don’t recycle face costly losses
12,500,000 tonnes – that’s the amount of waste generated by Australian businesses every year. It’s estimated that 70% of that waste can be reused or recycled, but nearly half (46%) of it goes to landfill. That’s three million tonnes of waste unnecessarily going to landfill each year. A new resource from Planet Ark, The Business Case for Less Waste, looks at both the monetary and other benefits reaped by businesses that tackle their waste problems. It also contains case studies highlight…
How do I recycle old computer monitors?
The most rapidly growing class of waste is electronic waste (e-waste), and old computer monitors (and TVs) make up a significant fraction of our tech trash. Traditionally, most of these old monitors ended up either being buried in landfill or exported to countries with poor health and environmental policies, either for rudimentary recycling or dumping. With old computer monitors containing toxic materials such as lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium, they represent something of a time bomb …
Lessons learned from old landfills: Why we need to recycle
Unlike true love, rubbish dumps don’t last forever. However, some of their contents do, and when a landfill starts to leak or erode, nasty stuff can make it out into the wider environment and become impossible to contain. In Victoria alone, dozens of old landfills are already suspected of leaking toxic materials into soil and waterways. In Port Fairy, coastal erosion is exposing an old rubbish dump, depositing the contents onto an otherwise pristine beach and creating a multi-million dollar h…
How workplace recycling can save your business money
Running an active recycling program in your workplace will not only help to reduce your impact on the environment, it can save your business money too. According to the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria, improving resource efficiency in your business can help it to save money, improve occupational health and safety management, enhance shareholder relations and improve your business’ reputation. There are a number of ways in which recycling can save your businesses money, or e…
Gold and mercury: A lethal mix
We’ve known for at least 200 years that mercury is a poisonous metal that causes horrific health problems, and even death. Yet, this critical information isn’t being made available to many of the people who are exposed to the highest levels of mercury. Artisanal gold miners, often poor and operating illegally, use mercury to separate small amounts of gold from crushed rock. The mercury-gold mix is then heated over open fires to vapourise the mercury, leaving behind pure gold. This dangerou…
Why is Aussie mercury waste being sent overseas?
Are you an Australian business looking to recycle mercury locally? As Australia’s largest and most experienced recycler of mercury, Ecocycle is ideally placed to help local resource companies develop transparent, effective and safe solutions for handling mercury-contaminated waste. Would you like to know more? Call us on 1300 32 62 92, or fill out the form below and one of our recycling experts will get in touch.  …
Recycle locally and reduce the carbon footprint of your company
You’ve probably heard of ‘food miles’ – the idea that transporting food over long distances gives it a huge carbon footprint relative to locally produced food. Those out of season Californian grapes and Peruvian asparagus spears may be delicious but they come with much bigger clouds of carbon dioxide emissions than locally grown, in-season produce. Recycling miles It’s a similar story when it comes to recycling. Large amounts of recyclable materials are shipped around the globe, racking up …
5 waste management tips for sports clubs and recreational centres
Sports clubs and recreational facilities are all about promoting health. And sport and exercise aren’t just about physical fitness: they also provide important psychological and social benefits. So, with all this focus on creating wellbeing, it would be a real tragedy if sports clubs and recreational centres undid some of that good work by contributing to environmental damage. Let’s face it. We all generate waste in all sorts of ways by just going about our normal activities. It’s the same…
E-waste in Australia: How businesses can recycle old computers
With e-waste in Australia growing at a faster rate than other types of waste, it’s important that we all do our bit to recycle old computers. As big users of technology, businesses are major creators of e-waste, and there are both moral and economic reasons as to why organisations need to have clear and effective policies when it comes to recycling e-waste. On the one hand, e-waste represents a major risk to the environment. On the other, it’s a source of valuable materials. And while t…
A win (and a loss) for local mercury recycling
Ecocycle recently achieved a small victory in helping to prevent the unnecessary shipment of mercury-containing waste overseas. A major natural gas producer voluntarily surrendered its hazardous waste export permit the evening before an Administrative Appeals Tribunal hearing was set to revoke the permit. The proceedings were instigated by Ecocycle, Australia’s only fully licensed mercury recycling company. It was, however, only a partial win for the environment. Two foreign-owned co…

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