A love letter to Brisbane’s Tour de Trash aka kerbside collection

Billions tune in to watch Tour de France riders fight for the yellow jersey through the French Alps, but the real thrill can be found much closer to home – the Tour de Trash.

Held in suburbs across Brisbane, the free annual kerbside collection service, which I’ve dubbed the Tour de Trash, features opportunists with utes, vans and trailers who, in feats of incredible endurance, drive slowly around local streets and stop erratically to scavenge treasures such as half-broken furniture and malfunctioning washing machines.

Kerbside collection is a free service offering an annual pick-up of large items and rubbish in Brisbane.Credit: Felicity Caldwell

Brisbane cycling enthusiasts will be lucky enough to get a taste of the trashy race this weekend.

The Tour de Brisbane is an annual bike race that will close many inner-city roads to cars on Sunday, April 14, with the 50km, 80km and 110km courses including a section of the river loop through West End and Highgate Hill.

Those suburbs are coincidentally also on Brisbane City Council’s kerbside collection calendar this weekend, meaning mounds of stained mattresses and broken lamps will cheer on Brisbane riders, much like the rowdy crowds at Alpe d’Huez in France.

The Tour de Brisbane’s website says the course embraces “our lifestyle, shows off our unique environment, and reflects our city’s vision to be the world’s most liveable city”.

The Tour de Brisbane course map for the 110km ride in 2024.Credit: Tour de Brisbane

They’re not talking about kerbside collection, and on a 110km-long course, riders won’t be staring at piles of rubbish for longer than a few minutes as they pedal along the river.

But I think kerbside collection and its sub-culture of trash-to-treasure pickers make this city great.

While the coronavirus pandemic could not cancel the Tour de France – it was just postponed a month in 2020 – it kyboshed Brisbane’s kerbside collection in mid-2020, a move expected to save $13 million over two years.

However, the council brought back the popular service just one year later, in July 2021.

Kerbside collection is immensely convenient for residents unable to take bulky items to the dump, great for people living in share houses who find a free discarded couch, and those opportunists who cut cables off electrical items to re-sell the copper, well, they get something too.

Sure, people need to remember to be adults and not make a mess or be dangerous, but re-use and upcycling is better than landfill, and it’s great Brisbane residents who do not have a way to get large items to the dump get to declutter for free.

A fellow kerbside collection fan enthused it should be held twice a year.

But the current service is expected to cost $37 million over the next four years, so I think we’d better cool the jets on that idea.

Instead, pity those people living elsewhere, like Moreton Bay, where they do not have free mass kerbside collection, and instead have to haul their own trash to the tip.

Moreton Bay used to have an on-demand collection service for bulky and large household items, but it was discontinued in October 2022 because only eight households a month used it.

“The cost to make available and maintain a rear lift truck, a flatbed truck and two workers was too much for the low uptake. It was not commercially viable for ratepayers to continue to finance this service used by less than 0.06 per cent of households in our region,” the council said at the time.

The Tour de Brisbane might throw up road blocks for salvaging, given many roads will be shut on Sunday morning, and it does seem a little extreme to pick through kerbside rubbish semi-professionally rather than ad hoc, but there are plenty more weeks in the year when you might just get lucky and come across discarded treasure in your own suburb.

Asked if it was legal for passers-by to take items left for collection, a council spokeswoman said there were “no specific rules”.

She said no complaints had been received about the timing of events and kerbside collection.

The Tour de Brisbane organisers were also contacted for comment.