This article was borrowed from Environment Victoria’s website –http://environmentvictoria.org.au/content/recycling-and-landfill

Recycling and landfill
Victorians are pretty enthusiastic recyclers. Over the past 20 years, we’ve really started to get our act together. We now recycle a total of 62 percent of our solid waste. So it may come as a surprise that the amount of waste we dump in landfill has largely remained unchanged.

It has to do with the amount we consume. We may recycle more but we also consume a lot more than we used to. The effect is that the amount of waste we produce has stayed the same. The availability of cheap and plentiful landfill sites to send our waste to doesn’t help matters.
Recycling has many benefits

The most important benefit is that we recover the raw materials used to make the stuff we use. It takes a lot of energy and water to extract and refine virgin materials from the earth. The process can also cause land degredation and even social upheaval in the local communities it affects. Recycling these raw materials can help us prevent this from occuring.

Recycling also helps us reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. When products are dumped in landfill, the energy used to make them is lost. Recycling them can help us recover some of this energy. Recycling organic waste also helps us reduce our impact on our climate by reducing the amount of methane gas released into the atmosphere.

Did you know…

At the last Victorian state election, the state government made a commitment to expand ‘a viable recycling industry’ and develop ‘new markets for recycled materials through the new Sustainability Fund’?

There’s more that we can do

Landfill levies are one of the most effective ways to increase the resources we recover and promote Sustainable Production and Consumption. Landfill levies are a cost put on the weight of material disposed to landfill. The cost of dumping waste in landfill includes the gate fee (set by the landfill operator) and the landfill levy (set by the state goverenment).

Packaging and product waste dumped to landfill is recorded in three ways: municipale waste (household), commercial and industrial waste (offices, retailers and manufacturers), and construction and demolition waste (building sites).

Inert waste (that is waste that doesn’t biodegrade) is currently subject to a different levy, depending on whether it is from a household or business. The levy also differs depending on whether it is being disposed of in a metropolitan or rural area.

The government has recently proposed changes to increase the landfill levy for dumping a tonne of waste at a metropolitan waste facility will rise from current rates of $9 per tonnes to $30 tonne next financial year, with further increases in following years. This will bring Victoria closer to the landfill levy in other states such as New South Wales.