City of Sydney

Zero Waste is the City’s campaign to reduce waste sent to landfill and keep streets clean. The plan is to do this by providing services that make it easy for the average person to recycle more and do the right thing.

The City offers a variety of services to help make the choice to recycle easier. This includes free pick up services every Wednesday that can be booked for large unwanted items such as mattresses, an e-waste event in October at Sydney Park Depot to recycle old electronic devices such as computers and phones, and a Chemical CleanOut held on the 16th of July, also at Sydney Park Depot.

The City also offers Green Waste pickup to avoid putting compostable material into landfills. Green waste is picked up every second Wednesday from the lime-green bins, and lime-green bins can be ordered from the City.

Part of the City’s effort also includes a dedicated team of street-cleaners that work every night to keep the roads of Sydney clean, as well as emptying ash trays, picking up syringes, and removing illegally dumped items. They also clean up graffiti, remove posters, and clean up foot and bike paths so as to keep them ready for everyone’s enjoyment.

The City spends a significant effort every day to recycle items that would’ve otherwise been thrown away. For example, they’ve had great success with their battery recycling program. Last year, more than 21,500 batteries were collected and safely recycled. But even in the face of this success, the City was wondering how to improve on the more than 172 million batteries that were still thrown away in Australia. They brainstormed and came up with a new plan – convenient bins! With this new effort, the City has collected more than 10,000 batteries in just four months.

It’s this kind of innovation that the City strives for, because it’s with ideas such as this that we can make a significant change in the way our planet thrives. By making recycling accessible and easy, Sydney is making a dent in the damage done by humans to the earth!