The three types of illegal rubbish dumpers, and the squad trying to catch them

On a roadside in Dallas, a sprawling pile of household junk has swallowed the nature strip outside a house.

Dumped by a recently departed tenant, the mountain of mattresses, furniture and other domestic detritus has been strapped with fluorescent orange tape. “Illegally dumped rubbish. Remove items immediately,” it reads.

City of Hume waste response officers Candice Bowen and Mick Brooks on the job in Dallas.Credit: Jason South

The City of Hume’s waste response team is a state-first unit that patrols the city’s streets, hunting for dumped rubbish.

The team of eight, who have been working for about a year, has two main aims: to find the many piles of dumped rubbish that litter the municipality, and to door-knock residents and speak to them about better ways to dispose of it.

Hume, in Melbourne’s outer north and covering suburbs including Broadmeadows, Craigieburn and Meadow Heights, has a rubbish problem.

The council spends on average $4.7 million of ratepayers’ money every year cleaning up illegally dumped rubbish. In the 2023-24 financial year, it responded to 11,998 incidents of rubbish dumping – about 33 a day.

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An Age survey of 677 council candidates found that integrity, roads and the environment were among the top three issues identified by more than 30 per cent of candidates.

Use the interactive to see what candidates in your area say about key issues.

Rubbish ranked fourth, with 19.2 per cent of respondents including it, except in Hume, where it topped the list.

Some people leave rubbish on the nature strip in the hope that someone else will see value in it ...Credit: Jason South

Aitken ward candidate and former Hume mayor Joseph Haweil said too many residents took a view that everyone else dumped their rubbish on the street, so why shouldn’t they.

“Over time, when people just keep doing the same thing, which is dumping rubbish, it creates a culture that it is acceptable to do it,” Haweil said.

“So you need to build into people that no, this is illegal, it’s the wrong thing to do. And you may dump it, but if council picks it up in a week, or in two weeks or three weeks, it doesn’t make it right.”

Waste response officer Mick Brooks said there were three main categories of dumpers: often first-generation migrants, who wrongly assume the council clears it without charge; those leaving items out as an offering for others who might want it; and those who just don’t care.

… but it doesn’t always work out that way.Credit: Jason South

The council has begun to offer residents two free tip vouchers a year, on top of two hard rubbish collections.

“I think it’s fair to say over the last four years that we have put in really innovative and radical solutions to try and address some of this stuff,” Haweil said.

But council data, based on evidence gathered from CCTV footage, suggests as much as 60 per cent of rubbish is dumped by people from outside the municipality. Often this will be large commercial loads such as building waste, dumped in parks in the dead of night.

“We’ve also got cowboys that are doing illegal rubbish removal,” said Jack Medcraft, a long-serving councillor and 2024 candidate in the Jacksons Creek ward. “Someone will have a load of building waste or whatever to get rid of. They’ll do it in a skip. And then that skip will end up dumped down one of the side roads.”

Medcraft has pushed for the council to introduce a “dob in a dumper” program, in which offenders are exposed on social media. But he acknowledges that many who do it deliberately know how to cover their tracks.

“We’ve caught some of them, but some of these trucks wear false number plates,” he said.

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