By Mikayla van Loon
Over 130 signatures have quickly been garnered by a petition to change the way hard rubbish is collected throughout the Yarra Ranges after being started early last week.
Organiser of the petition Travis Citrine said seeing the disgraceful placing of hard rubbish on nature strips weeks before collection ignited the need for a petition.
“It just looks horrible, that’s the biggest thing. If you look around the streets of Mooroolbark at the moment, it’s like a rubbish tip,” he said.
“For a lot of others, there are people just driving around at night, disturbing people’s peace. That hasn’t really happened to me, I have had people rummage through if I’ve had boxes…and then leave rubbish all over the place.”
Yarra Ranges Council currently uses an annual scheduled system, where hard rubbish is collected from January to March across all 55 towns and roughly 61,500 properties in the shire.
Mr Citrine is calling for the system to be changed to a twice yearly booked collection decided on at the resident’s discretion.
“I lived in Maroondah prior to moving to Yarra Ranges Council and Maroondah has a booked system, they’ve had it like that for a long time and it works very well,” he said.
“You can book your hard rubbish online, they mail you out a sticker and the weekend before your collection, you just put it all out on the lawn and then you might have a pile every once in a while but for the main part of the suburb looks pretty clean.”
While Mr Citrine said you may still get people rummaging through the rubbish “the difference is it’s not known to everybody that it’s hard rubbish time” reducing the disturbances and mess.
Many people have experienced nighttime drivebys, with Mooroolbark residents taking to the community noticeboard to call people out.
“Thank you so much to the person who drove up our court at 11pm at night with their trucks high beams on, stopping at each house and then searching on our property with torches through hard rubbish,” one person said.
“Thanks for your lights shining right into our bedroom, waking me up and scaring me! It’s a bit disconcerting to see torches and movement out [the] front of your house at 11pm.”
Another resident also commented on the inconsiderate behaviour of some people placing their rubbish on other people’s piles, making a mess leaving the resident responsible for cleaning it up.
“I love living in Mooroolbark and I don’t mind the dozens of cars who stop to have a look at our hard rubbish.
“However, I’m a bit disgusted at people who rummage through our hard rubbish and leave it strewn across the nature strip.”
Despite these concerns, Yarra Ranges Council planning and sustainable futures director Kath McClusky said the scheduled collections are the most cost effective and reliable for residents.
“Because our municipality is spread over 2500 square kilometres, it is extremely cost effective to run a scheduled collection, where an entire street has their waste collected at the same time,” she said.
“Having on-call collections would result in a much higher cost for the service, which would be passed on to residents through their annual waste charge.”
Ms McClusky said for the residents who live in the more regional parts of the shire, booked collections potentially during winter are not feasible.
“The collection also runs through the driest part of the year – this is because we have many unsealed roads, some with steep terrain, and the collection trucks for hard waste are significantly heavier than regular kerbside bin trucks.
“In wet weather, many items would pose a risk to the contractors to manage, and there would be added difficulties accessing our remote properties.”
With the changes to Victoria’s kerbside bin collections, Ms McClusky said throughout 2022 the community was asked about on-call hard rubbish collections.
“From more than 7000 responses, 75 per cent of people said they’d prefer collections to continue at a set time. 72 per cent of respondents said they wanted the current timing of January-March to continue.
“We’re now finalising our Community Waste and Resource Recovery Plan, for release later this year – largely focusing on wheelie bin collections and recycling changes – but the current arrangement of our hard waste system is unlikely to change for the reasons above.”
Mr Citrine said he would let the petition run for a little while longer before contacting each respondent for the appropriate details needed to submit it to the council.
“I’ll just let it run for a little bit until the next meeting. I’ll have to extract the people who have signed the petition and I’ll email them privately with an actual form to put those details down for me,” he said.
“Then I can submit that to the council properly in the format they need it. I’ll probably go to the next council meeting and see how it goes.”
The petition can be found here www.change.org/p/change-hard-rubbish-collections-to-a-booked-system
