New City initiative encourages at-home composting

HEY legends,

Happy Autumn to you! It’s that weird time of year again where we have to adjust to the end of Daylight Saving Time messing with our circadian rhythms, and our body clock wonders what the heck is going on for a little while.

Alongside our mornings getting lighter earlier, a few more local transformations have occurred including shiny new things, new things made from old things and shiny new things that turn old things into new things. Say what?

Mount Duneed school crossing

One of the great wins that Kardinia councillors have celebrated is the new, shiny and spectacular pedestrian crossing is located outside Mirripoa Primary School in Mount Duneed.

We have seen massive growth in the population of children attending this school and the increased traffic has presented several safety issues for folks trying to get to school each morning.

Luckily, council has engaged in a jointly funded City and Transport Accident Commission project to undertake much-needed upgrades to street lighting, line marking and the installation of a raised pedestrian crossing.

The new road treatments and school crossing supervisor form an integral contribution in helping students and their families to safely travel to the growing primary school.

You might have spotted similar raised wombat crossings around Kardinia ward and Geelong’s CBD, so make sure you look out for pedestrians when approaching them, be careful and slow down (unless you really don’t like the diff in your car).

Everything old is new again

Even with the huge behavioural changes we have seen to our plastic bag use at the supermarket, our landfill sites are still often plagued with plastic refuse and tyres that are difficult to upcycle.

However, thanks to some clever and creative folks, council is trialling the use of recycled fine crushed rock, Polyrock aggregate kerb mix and crumbed rubber asphalt in the rebuild of Maple Place, located in Waurn Ponds.

Crushed and sorted locally, 366 tonnes of recycled FCR was used in the road sub-grade and sub-base layer – a monumental amount of repurposed waste that will now live forever in our upgraded city roads!

The City’s kerb and channel works are also using Polyrock aggregate that consists of 95 per cent post-consumer plastic waste, so instead of your gross old plastic toothbrush going into landfill and taking a thousand years to biodegrade, it now forms part of our shiny new road infrastructure.

Having said that, consider making your new toothbrush a bamboo one if you haven’t done so already, bamboo is quick to grow and biodegrade, forming a wonderful part of our circular economy.

This road renovation success story is one of many energy-saving and waste-reducing road projects that will help deliver incredible outcomes for people, the environment and the economy.

In this project alone, approximately 150,000 plastic bags, 50 tyres and 3,000 plastic bottles were diverted from landfill.

The City has also trialled crushed glass use in road resurfacing, which reduces the amount of building waste going to landfill. Joy!

Subsidised Home Composting Program

They say that the best things in life are free, so the second-best things must be on discount, right?

Well, as part of a wonderful new initiative, you can receive a council subsidised compost bin or a worm farm if you’re keen to try composting at home.

Residents of Greater Geelong can access one discount per household on a first-come, first-served basis at the initiative’s online shop at geelong.wormlovers.com.au/shop so please make sure you get in quick as this initiative could save you over $100.

What’s maybe even better than saving money? Saving the energy costs of picking up and processing household food and garden waste, and being able to enrich your soil quality by placing the composted good-times back into your fab garden and being the envy of all your neighbours!

If you’ve already got a composting bin or worm farm sorted, but you want more information on how to get the most out of your new set-up, log on to the City’s free online workshop on April 7th and find out all about how to compost to keep the good microbiome in, the vermin out, and the right mix of carbon and nitrogen to make sure it doesn’t end up looking and smelling like a dog’s breakfast.

Lastly, don’t forget to check out Council’s Sustainability Performance Report to see how we’re tracking on our Sustainability Framework Action Plan and targets.

Feel free to contact me at [email protected] and until next time, may your mashed potatoes be ever fluffy.

Peace.

Cr Belinda Moloney,
Kardinia ward