Australian households generated 14 million tonnes of waste in 2020-21. That’s 540kg per person! But not all waste is created equal – where does yours go?
This article will help you reduce your landfill waste with practical tips and links to our other resources. 🌱 It covers:
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- Food & Organic Waste and the best thing you can do for the planet!
- Local Loops – items for reuse or recycling locally.
- Kerbside Collectibles – maximise your kerbside recycling.
- Scrunch Bunch – soft plastic recycling with TerraCycle.
- TerraCycle Treasures – items going into the TerraCycle Zero Waste box.
- Consult the Oracle – items you’re unsure about.
- Doomed! – sad items for landfill.
Food & Organic Waste
The #1 thing you can do to reduce climate change is NOT WASTE FOOD. The #2 thing? Keep your food and organic waste out of landfill.
So if you don’t have an organic waste solution, check out this article first. If you still can’t find a solution, get in touch with us and we’ll help, because this is REALLY important.
If you want to start an organic waste system but need a hand, check out local business Reconnect to Nature. Alisa is brilliant and will help you choose and set up the best system for your home.
At HQ we can’t get enough food waste! We have chooks who love eating scraps, a worm farm, a compost tumbler and large compost bins for bigger garden organics. We might even be able to process your waste at HQ if you need a hand.
Since half of household waste is organic, tackling this dramatically cuts landfill reliance. 🌏
Kerbside Recycling
Your humble kerbside recycling bin is the second big player in reducing landfill. Make sure you really know everything that can (and can’t) go in it.
We recommend printing your local rules and sticking them on your fridge or bin!
📌 City of Busselton A-Z Waste Guide
🚫 Common mistakes (for CoB):
- No plastic bags! Recycling in bags is thrown out.
- No soft plastics! (gladwrap, postage sacks, sandwich bags etc.) They clog sorting machines.
♻️ Pro tips (for CoB):
- Nothing smaller than your palm—ball up foil and put little pieces of paper or cardboard bread tags in an envelope. Plastic lids can go in your Local Loops recycling (see below), beer caps can go to Containers for Change.
- Lids off bottles & jars.
- Only cartons without silver lining go in.
💡 Wish-cycling? If in doubt, leave it out!
Each of us generates 100kg of plastic waste per year – so, if you need a hand learning what goes where, please drop us a DM and we’ll add you to our list. When we have enough participants we’ll run a short ‘What Bin Does it Go In?’ session.
Local Loops
The king of this system is the Local Loops bin in which goes everything that can be reused or recycled locally.
Here is a list of what goes in this bucket at HQ:
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- Brown cardboard
- Bubble Wrap
- Dental & its packaging
- Dish & Air Care & its packaging
- Glad wrap
- Glass jars with lids
- Hair care & their packaging
- Make up
- Pet food bags
- Plastic Bread tags
- Plastic lids (small)
- Printer Cartridges
- Razors V their packaging
- Sandwich bags
- Skin care & its packaging
- Stationery
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🔎 Find your nearest drop-off points on our FREE Community Reuse & Recycle Map!
- 👉 In Busselton? The People Place on Kent St.
- 👉 In Dunsborough? Community Repair CoOp at St George’s Family Centre.
- 👉 Any A Single Leaf South West events!
💡 Reuse is better than recycling! The bold items above are reused locally—double win!
Many of these are recycled through TerraCycle and paid for by brands who produce them – this has the bonus of making the producers responsible for the cost of recycling so it is well worth participating in these schemes as they send a powerful message. Once the full cost of taking responsibility for the entire lifespan of the items they make hits home financially, we will see companies switching to designs that can be refilled or have minimal waste.
Scrunch Bunch – soft plastic recycling
Australians use 3,000 pieces of soft plastic per person per year but only 13% is recycled.
To reduce our soft plastic at HQ we:
✅ Shop in bulk & buy loose produce.
✅ Use packaging-free stores like Dunsborough Growers Market & Prana in Busselton.
✅ Use alternatives to cling wrap and sandwich bags
BUT we can’t avoid it all so we purchase a Soft Plastic Waste Recycling Box – it’s not cheap, but it holds a lot of plastic and for us, it is worth it. This year we’ve remembered to label when we started the box so we’ll know how long it takes for us to fill her up!
How it works:
📦 Order the box → Fill it → Drop at the post office (it’s already labelled and paid for) → TerraCycle recycles it.
♻️ The plastic is turned into pellets for new products!
🚀 Watch the process here!
💡 Buy your own box here.
(Please note we are not affiliated with TerraCycle in anyway none of our recommendations are sponsored by them! They run some great options for waste so we happily recommend them.)
TerraCycle Treasures
The second box we have paid for is a TerraCycle All-In-One Zero Waste Box, again not a cheap option, but a good one for us. This box can take SO many different items! Already we have put in:
- coffee bags,
- a piece of hard plastic that broken off a bucket
- butter wrappers which can’t be recycled elsewhere
This is hopefully going to reduce our landfill waste to almost nothing.
🌏 If you think it could help you too, buy yours here.
Consult the Oracle
Sometimes this recycling lark can be complicated, sometimes we’re having one of those days and it’s too hard, and sometimes you just don’t have the answer.
Welcome to your ‘Consult the Oracle’ bin. Place items you’re unsure about here and let the household recycling expert tell you where they go.
❓ Still unsure?
👉 Ask us! Ask on our socials, email, or bring items to one of our events – we love a good rubbish chat!
DOOMED!
The Doomed Bin is for all those items that are destined for landfill – if there really is no other option for them. At HQ doomed items so far include:
- the soggy thing at the bottom of meat trays (gross!)
- teabags (mostly contain plastic) which somehow sneak in despite the fact that we buy loose leaf tea!
- a ripped compostable plastic bag (too damaged to reused and can’t be recycled in our TerraCycle Soft Plastics box – look out for more info on compostable plastic coming soon and the results of our home composting trials!).
Hopefully this bin won’t get very full. It will be interesting to see what goes in it now we have the Zero Waste box and if we can avoid anything that does end up here.
Our ‘Buy Nothing New for 2025’ challenge should really help reduce our waste, too. New items usually come with packaging that needs to be disposed of and whatever they are replacing often needs throwing away. Without having the easy route of buying something new, maybe we’ll even be inspired to make something with some of our rubbish!
So…where will your waste go? Let’s be less rubbish with rubbish.