The future of compost is unclear, but Lismore’s recycling facility is almost back on track with glass, aluminium, plastics and paper.

Since the great compost fire of August 2019, it’s been a slow rebuild of the recycling-sorting machinery that burned down at Lismore's Recycling and Resource Recovery Centre.

Amid very dry and windy conditions, the fire burnt for 10 days causing extensive damage.

Lismore City Council Mayor Isaac Smith said Council’s insurance claim had been successful and there would be no ongoing financial impact to Council from rebuilding the facility.

“The fire caused an enormous disruption to our business and the services we provide to the community, so it’s really exciting to see the rebuilding work,” he said. "Part of the new build was a big shed for keeping the recycling dry in order to make it easier to process."

With half of the machinery now in operation, and the other half ready soon, the Centre manager Andy Irvine said he hoped the full build will be complete by the end of the year – but that work had been held up by the Queensland border closures which stopped necessary materials getting to the site.

Compost

“Fires in compost piles happen all the time,” Andy said. “The rebuild is in a different location and the new compost piles will be reduced in scale.

“The equipment required to make the compost burned in the fire too. We are almost done rebuilding the blowers for the compost and we’ll be back in business on a small scale after planning with Council and councillors about what to do.”

Mayor Smith said as far as whether or not the facility would return to pre-fire production levels of compost production goes, Council was looking at what was the best way to handle the income streams from the facility.

“We will look for the best outcome to get a good return, while managing the waste sustainably,” he said.

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Sorting trial and container deposit scheme

Andy said staff were currently doing a trial sorting of recycling trying to work out what people are actually putting into their bins.

“The container deposit scheme has changed what the make up of bins are,” he said. “So we are picking though tonnes of recycling and weighing it so we can plan future operations at the facility. and how to charge accordingly.

“There used to be more glass and plastic bottles before people got 10 cents a container and stopped putting them in the yellow bins.

Unscramble

“From a sorting point of view, it’s great. We don’t have to unscramble the mix of recycling. It means we have a cleaner product to sell.

“Bales of aluminium are a much wanted commodity and worth a lot to us. But we don’t want it contaminated, because the price drops if there is plastic in it.

Should we put cigarette butts in cans?

“It’s best to keep things as clean as possible, but if there’s a cigarette butt in a can, at the end of the day it will be melted down anyway.

“It’s more about the capacity of our facility to keep soft plastics out of bales – it gets into everything and makes it hard. The standards of clean end products has been lifted massively in this industry.

Common recycling mistakes

Andy said a common mistake people made was to put nappies in the green waste.

“It makes life really difficult,” he said. “We want no plastic bags in green waste - don’t think that it might break down eventually.

“Also in yellow bins, we don’t want heavily contaminated packaging.

Bottle tops

“If a glass bottle comes through, it goes through the glass breaker. If it still has a bottle top on it, the bit of glass with it goes to waste. If the top wasn’t there, the whole glass bottle would be broken up, turned into glass and used in a road or something.

“If people can take care at the source with recycling, we can recover so much more - when it’s badly contaminated, there’s nothing we can do with it."

Future

Mayor Smith said the Lismore Recycling and Recovery Centre is a $3.65 million Material Recovery Facility and processes around 15,000 tonnes of recyclables per year,

“We are looking forward to once again being able to manage waste in our own backyard,” he said.

“I want to acknowledge the community for their patience during the last 12 months as both the fire and COVID-19 has had significant impacts on our waste services.

“I would also like to thank our waste staff, who have been under enormous pressure, and have continued to show incredible commitment under very trying conditions to deliver essential services for our whole community.”

Since the fire, Council has been working with contractors in the Northern Rivers and south-east Queensland to manage the waste.