Waste Education
Bayside Council has a number of Waste Education programs to promote waste reduction in our LGA.
Composting & Worm Farming
Household Worm Farming
Worms can help cut down on organic household waste. They transform your food scraps and other organic matter such as leaves and paper into nutrient-rich fertiliser. Plus, worm farms are perfect for those with limited space or no garden, making it easy to compost and enrich your soil even without a large outdoor area.
Household Composting
You can turn your leftover food and garden waste into organic fertiliser for your garden. The compost will help keep moisture in your soil and suppress weed growth. Anything that was once part of a plant can be composted in a compost bin. This includes but is not limited to all your vegetable scraps (cooked or raw), tea leaves, coffee grounds, shredded paper, and potting mix. Mix as many of these items together as you can find and keep the whole lot moist and aerated. This will give the best results. It will take up to 10 weeks to produce good compost.
Compost and Worm Farm Workshops
Bayside Council hosts compost and worm farm workshops throughout the year. Keep an eye on our events page to see when an event is coming up.
Interested in Composting or Worm Farming?
You can buy your compost bin and worm farm from the Bayside Garden Centre.
The Circular Economy
Bayside Council uses a circular economy model for managing waste in a way that reduces the amount of disposed material in landfill and creates more environmentally friendly resources for Bayside.
Our approach to the circular economy ensures that most reusable material is returned to benefit the community, while smaller amounts of unsuitable material are treated before disposing in landfill.
We have won 13 state environmental awards since 2018, including a 2023 National Local Government Awards finalist nomination in the category of Waste Management.
The circular economy waste management process
There are eight simple stages of waste management in a circular economy that places the community at the centre of the waste process, while Bayside Council leads initiatives and innovations that make products from responsibly disposed waste.
Stage | Examples |
---|---|
Refuse | Avoid using single-use plastics |
Rethink | Share products rather than disposing |
Reduce | Choosing products with longer a life cycle, and reduce food wastage |
Reuse / rehome | Donate usable items instead of throwing them out |
Repair / refurbish | Attempt to fix broken products before disposing |
Repurpose | Use unwanted plastic takeaway containers to make a worm farm |
Recycle | Process used office paper to make recycled office paper |
Recover | Thermally treat materials (processed engineered fuels) that cannot be reused or recycled to generate heat and electricity |
Waste Services Guide
The Bayside Council Waste Services Guide is available here.