Everything you need to know about Townsville’s bin police checking your recycling
Townsville council’s new bin police are checking your recycling, backed by nearly a quarter of a million dollars in state funding to crack down on yellow-lid contamination. Here’s what you need to know.
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Hold onto your wheelie bins, Townsville because the bin police are out in force.
Residents along Riverway Dr were recently left scratching their heads after spotting workers in high vis lifting their bin lids at 8pm at night — but no, they’re not bin bandits. It’s part of Townsville City Council’s new bin health check program, running until September across seven suburbs.
Armed with clipboards, the council’s rubbish cops are doing visual checks of your recycling bins on collection day, looking for sneaky non-recyclables like soft plastics, bagged recyclables, scrap metal, and garden scraps.
Get caught? You’ll cop a bright tag on your bin reminding you to sort it properly — and repeat offenders may even get revisits to check if they’ve cleaned up their act.
But residents can rest easy knowing the $240,000 program isn’t being funded by ratepayers — the council secured the cash through the Queensland Government’s Let’s Get It Sorted (LGIS) Partnership Program.
On top of that, Townsville secured $440,000 to fund a ‘Behaviour Change Coordinator’ for the North Queensland Regional Organisation of Councils (NQROC), whose job is to roll out waste education and behaviour change programs across the region.
Acting Mayor Ann-Maree Greaney says the blitz is all about boosting recycling and cutting landfill.
But she’s keen to reassure locals the “contracted waste education officers” won’t be rifling through rubbish — just taking a look.
The focus is on suburbs like Annandale, Condon, Cranbrook, Douglas, Kirwan, Rasmussen, and Thuringowa Central, where contamination levels in recycling bins average over 24 per cent.
The latest data shows Townsville sends 271,000 tonnes of waste to landfill each year and even after diverting over 104,400 tonnes through recycling, a whopping 166,580 tonnes still gets buried.
“Every Townsville resident can do their part in reducing waste to landfill by recycling effectively,” Cr Greaney said.
“This includes recycling properly at home, not bagging your recycling and taking items that are still usable to your local op shop, or the Magnetic Island Tip Shop.”
Looking at the bigger picture, Queensland’s landfill crisis has been spiralling out of control, with waste jumping from 1.7 million tonnes in 2015 to nearly 2 million tonnes today — while recycling rates have gone backwards.
The new Crisafulli Government is rolling out a $130m Resource Recovery Boost to help councils build better waste infrastructure and stop red-bin rubbish from choking up landfill.
But the catch is that councils won’t get a full advance waste levy payment for 2025–26, meaning they may have to cut services or jack up rates to cover the shortfall.
Alison Smith, head of the Local Government Association of Queensland (LGAQ), warns the cash splash is a good start but falls short of what’s needed: “The $130m is a welcome start to help set up councils, but is less than half of the funding that Queensland’s Regional Organisations of Councils are projecting is required to deliver regional waste management plans over the next four years.”
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Originally published as Everything you need to know about Townsville’s bin police checking your recycling
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