Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I would like to talk about the issue of hazardous household waste and what can be done with it. I would like to congratulate my local council, Maroondah City Council, for organising a collection of such waste just last weekend. It is done under a state government program run through Sustainability Victoria called the Detox Your Home program. I am very proud to say that that program has run in Victoria since 1994. It has run across both Liberal and Labor state governments. The only problem that I see with it is that not enough people know about it. It is a program whereby you can take all your leftover liquid chemicals, paints, used fluorescent tubes—and a whole list of things, which I may go through a bit later on—and deposit them at a mobile facility for free.

I am sure that many people here have had the experience of having an old barbecue with a gas cylinder, for instance, that has gone beyond its use-by date of 10 years. Of course the refuelling station will not refill it and the rubbish collectors will not take it. So you end up with lots of things like that sitting in garages and other places.

Even worse than that though—and it is something I have most certainly had a problem with over the years—is paint. Many people do a bit of their own painting, and that is a great thing. But the thing about it is that there is never quite the right amount; you either use it all up and have to get another one or there is half a can left. I am certainly one of those people. So on Saturday, 25 February, I, along with around about 1,700 other people, attended the drop-off point that Maroondah council had set up in Lincoln Road in Croydon. It was a great turnout. In many ways it was a too good turn out because it created a fairly major traffic jam. But to know that people in the Maroondah LGA area, which is part of Deakin, care so much that they do not just throw chemicals like that down the drain or over the fence and make them someone else's problem, but keep them for a period of time and then make sure they are disposed of properly, is a really good thing.

It was quite heartening to see people sitting in a traffic jam for literally an hour and a half on a Saturday morning in the outer suburbs just waiting their turn so they could get rid of their hazardous household chemicals. There were utes—tradesmen's utes and tradeswomen's utes—full of empty paint cans and half-empty paint cans. There were all sorts of things, gas bottles, as I said, and other chemicals. There was a really great team employed by the council through Sustainability Victoria that was making sure that everything was separated and put into the right pile so that it could be disposed of safely or, in some cases, recycled. It is not something we get with our standard household waste collection, but it is something that needs to be advertised more widely. The event was so successful that Maroondah council is now putting on another one—it has organised one for 17 March as well. That is also a good thing.

There are a lot of other things that could be done and probably should be advertised with the program. The program has been running since 1994 and there was a review in 2011 of how well it works. The review found that, over the life of the program in Victoria, over 8,000 tonnes of potentially harmful chemicals were disposed of through the program. That means that those chemicals have not ended up in our landfills or our waterways, and that is particularly important.

Some of the statistics on the program: between 1 July 2005 and 30 June 2010 there were 175 mobile collections across Victoria that were visited by more than 46,970 people. The usage rates are interesting, because the metropolitan collections, as the report says, sometimes attracted over 1,000 visits—obviously ours got 1,700 on the weekend—but noted that some of the rural ones, because of their locations, sometimes got only 10 visits. In the period between 1 July 2005 and 30 June 2010, over 2,100 tonnes of material was collected, three-quarters of it in the Melbourne metropolitan area. The important part that I should also talk about is that removing these chemicals from the home really helps solve some OH&S problems that come up. A lot of people think that occupational health and safety only belongs at work; it belongs in the home as well when you are dealing with some of the fairly heavy duty chemicals that are easily purchasable in retail amounts from your local hardware store.

I need to talk more about some of these things at a future date—one of them is rechargeable batteries. A lot of people end up disposing of rechargeable batteries by throwing them in the bin. They end up in our landfill and the run-off from that pollutes our waterways. It is a great program. (Time expired)