Sydney residents furious after uncovering decade-old practice

Sydney residents are steaming with rage after catching rubbish removalists breaking one cardinal sin while collecting their bins.

Sydney residents have been left furious after discovering rubbish collectors have been mixing bins for years.

Residents in Sydney’s southwest have expressed their outrage online after catching rubbish collectors mixing yellow-bin recycling with red-bin garbage – a practice a council said had gone on for more than a decade.

Canterbury-Bankstown Mayor Khal Asfour said narrow streets were the issue, with rubbish collectors struggling to collect rubbish separately from “hard to access” homes.

“This is about public safety and our larger trucks accessing narrow streets with cars parked either side,” he said.

While Mr Asfour said the council had been working with the community to address the issue, some locals said they were never informed of the move, posting to social media to express their frustrations.

“Why am I separating my recycling from my general waste when (the collectors) come along and mix it all up again?” one resident asked.

The post prompted responses from locals who confirmed it wasn’t just a one off.

Sydney residents have been left outraged after catching rubbish collectors mixing yellow-bin recycling with red-bin garbage.

“This morning I watched them empty the garbage bin by hand and drop the rubbish into the recycle bin and then manually lift the recycle bin and load the contents into the truck,” one said.

The Australian Council of Recycling (ACOR) told The Sydney Morning Herald the approach sent “all the wrong messages”.

“If you can get one (truck down a street), you can get two,” ACOR chief executive Suzanne Toumbourou said.

“What we really want is for people to have confidence that the effort they make to sort their rubbish is going to be rewarded by delivering strong recycling outcomes.”

Nearby councils with smaller streets said they had employed enough trucks to collect recycling separately, ensuring that garbage was disposed of properly.

“Council does not mix garbage and recycling in the same truck,” an Inner West Council spokesperson said.

“This runs absolutely counter to the effort we’re trying to make across the country in creating those systems in running kerbside recycling.”

An Inner West Council spokeswoman says the practice runs ‘absolutely counter’ to what councils are trying to achieve. Picture: John Grainger

While rubbish collectors were caught mixing garbage in the LGA, Canterbury-Bankstown council was introducing camera technology to check the contents of residents’ bins to educate them about what to do with waste.

“As a council, we want to proactively incorporate smart thinking into the daily lives of our residents,” the council’s website said.

The council has also introduced a “well done tag” for keeping recyclables and food waste out of landfill and an “Oh no tag” for those putting the wrong things in their bins.

Mr Asfour said the council took the issue “very seriously,” announcing that council staff will undertake “a full review of our waste operations”.

“In some instances, residents asked council to install no parking signs so trucks could have proper access, and in other cases, residents wheeled bins to the end of their street,” he said.

“I’ll move heaven and earth to sort this out.”