WASTE MANAGEMENT: A Local Government Specialisation in Tasmania

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Tasmanian Local Government has developed a specialisation that ratepayers could well do without. 

Launceston City Council is pretty much Top Dog in the 'Waste Management' stakes given that:

• it charges ratepayers for taking their left over resources; and 
• then manages to waste them on a monumental scale; and
• all the time boasting unsustainably about their credentials as "Waste Managers".

In the Mercury's  Saturday Soapbox: Landfill just a wasted opportunity ... SHANE HUMPHERYS MERCURY APRIL 18, 2015 12:00AM – Shane Humphery points out that "Tasmania has the worst record of diversion of waste from landfill in the nation, and we are going backwards. The most recent data demonstrates that as a state we divert little more than 10 per cent all our waste from landfill, while the national average approaches 60 per cent. With little in the way of recycling and reprocessing infrastructure, most of what is recycled has to be shipped interstate or to South-East Asia."

This is nowhere more evident than in the North of the State. Launceston City Council huffs and puffs its exemplary performance in "WASTE MANAGEMENT" and irony begins with the Council Division's name – WASTE MANAGEMENT CENTRE: The place where they manage to waste mega amounts of resources.

Some time ago at a public meeting Launceston's General Manager, Robert Dobrzynski, was asked if he would change the centre's name to "Resource Recovery Centre" like Councils all over are doing and very bluntly he said "NO!" He's been as good as his word as "Waste Centre" is still the brand. Mind you, the Aldermen over the years have not been able to, or willing to, make him change his mind!

At  Launceston's City Council's Waste Management Centre (LCC-WMC)  their so called 'TIP SOP' Utipity – a really really catchy name – is a 'no muck' version of what this sort of enterprise can do and does elsewhere. Its really nice, years and years in the planning, and it must be the only Goldplated ... well hot dipped zinc plated ... facility of its kind in Christendom. That'll cost the ratepayers a pretty penny with no dividends – in fact it has.

As Shane Humphery says in Landfill just a wasted opportunity "In truly efficient systems, waste is broken down and reconstructed, reprocessed and reused" and the 'waste' that cannot be expediently dealt with is an energy source. As he says, "If waste were not managed in this way in nature, biological and ecological systems would collapse rapidly."

But we get the Council we vote for! Or do we? The waste management paradigm that the Local Government system puts upon us is yet another reason for changing the system. The system is too inefficient, too much under the CONTROL of too many bureaucrats and too inclined towards unaccountability to persist with. 

There is no use advocating change to waste management until Local Government in Tasmania is TOTALLY RATIONALISED.

LAUNCESTON'S WASTE BLOT, LCC-WMC, AS SEEN FROM SPACE