insidenewsletter - Tertiary Education Facilities Management ...

insidenewsletter AUTUMN/WINTER 2006 29
collected with general rubbish in the
same bin and taken to a resource
recovery facility at Eastern Creek.
And no, this definitely does not mean
we have stopped recycling containers!
The previous system recovered
just a tiny percentage of bottles and
cans. The new system, called
‘UR-3R’ (for ‘Urban Resource –
Reduction, Recovery and Recycling’)
has a higher rate of recovery of
recyclable containers than household
kerbside recycling, recovers a much
wider range of materials and provides
‘safety net’ recovery of paper, organics
and some other materials. All
organic waste materials are greenhouse
stabilised to European Union
standards to minimise the emission of
harmful greenhouse gases.
The UR-3R facility has a direct
financial incentive to maximise
resource recovery, so the range and
proportion of materials recovered is
continually increasing. Less than
23 per cent of material collected will
end up in landfill, as against nearly
99 per cent at present.
As well as many fingers in the pie,
waste management at UNSW has
suffered from an ongoing lack of
transparency and information for
users of the various services. Angus
Campbell, deputy manager of the
Environment Unit, has set up a
user-friendly ‘one-stop shop’ website
to provide access to the different
resource recovery and waste
management services, documenting
how and by whom they are being
managed. The URL could not be
simpler: www.recycling.unsw.edu.au
will take you to the relevant FM
website, with links to each of the
University’s waste services.
The website also flags a number
of new works in progress, such as
laboratory equipment reuse, a major
issue in an organisation with literally
hundreds of labs. In addition, several
existing but less than fully operational
schemes, for example end-oflife
computer reuse, have been
revamped. Staff about to replace
their obsolete, but still functioning
computers have the option of
donating their machine, which
results in the computer being
made available to financially
disadvantaged members of our
community via a charity with which
UNSW has a memorandum of
understanding. These computers
are reconditioned and a proportion
are returned to the UNSW Equity
and Diversity Unit for donation to
needy students.
Of course a website is not the only
way of getting the message across.
The launch of the new system
will include a major exercise in
bin-stickering, plus articles in the
online news@unsw and in other
UNSW publications, promoting
the key ‘Towards Zero Waste’
message as well as the specific
details of what is being collected in
a particulartype of bin.
To sum up, the University’s new
integrated resource recovery and
waste management systems focus
on accountability, transparency and
service delivery – terms that we
can all expect to hear a lot more
of over the next few years.®