An abandoned sound system left outside a club. A giant paper elephant 2m long and 1m high. A group of puppets, waiting to be liberated.
Annual kerbside cleanup days are, for some, akin to Christmas – a holy time for up-cyclers and “waste warriors” to forage the streets for a speck of gold.
But wastage concerns are seeing councils increasingly moving away from annual collections to online booking services of varying quantities, making it harder for scavengers to bring home a haul.
The vast majority of council collections are unable to be reused once disposed, and end up being crushed for landfill.
Australians are among the largest per capita waste producers in the globe, trailing behind only the US and Canada.
In 2020-21, Melbourne’s Yarra city council collected 2,946 tonnes of hard rubbish – of which more than 2,000 tonnes weren’t able to be repaired or recycled.
The council now offers two hard waste pick-ups a year but encourages residents to “reduce before you book” and re-home or donate unwanted items before leaving them on the street.
In the City of Port Phillip – south of the Melbourne CBD – residents are entitled to between four and six hard and green waste collections a year.
Mayor Marcus Pear says the council has undertaken an on-demand hard rubbish collection for the past 15 years. “It allows us to better respond to the individual needs of our community,” he says.
The City of Sydney provides a free weekly service for bulky waste, mattresses and green waste including “real or plastic Christmas trees”, currently delayed due to Covid-19, while Sydney’s Inner West council is working towards zero waste targets by redirecting resources away from landfill through “needs based” collections online.
About 82% of household items and furniture it collects ends up in landfill.
While most councils are careful to discourage the practice of hard rubbish on environmental and wastage grounds, others threaten fines for scavenging on the street.
Darebin city council – in Melbourne’s inner north – runs two seasonal hard rubbish collections in spring and winter, but threatens a $300 fine for anyone picking up items.
In the City of Port Phillip, the figure is $660, with a recycling recovery rate of 60 to 70% due to separate pre-sorting collections of hard and green waste.
But the practice of street scavenging also runs by unwritten rules. Once on the nature strip – fair game. But if it’s in the bin? Leave it.
Street bounty groups that pop up on social media are one way waste warriors and diehard collectors have overcome the move from annual hard rubbish days.
Annie Lenne is one of the thousands of members of Darebin Hard Rubbish Heroes, a Facebook group that promotes the concept of recycle and reuse by keeping preloved items out of landfill.
Lenne’s latest find was a bag of discarded hardcover art books.
“I love seeing stuff on the side of the road and being like – ‘oh my God, who’s getting rid of this? This is perfect’,” she says.
Lenne frequents op shops, but finds something special in “saving trash and giving it a whole new life”.
“Sometimes it’s fully functioning and working, and some of the time it needs a bit of work or TLC,” she says. “I’ve upcycled big furniture pieces – an armchair picked up off the road, a hallway table that just needed a light sanding, refinishing and screwing the legs back on.”
Apart from chance encounters and social media posts, Lenne follows council pickup times and, when a hard rubbish date is set, goes on day trips with her housemates.
“I don’t understand why it’s illegal to pick up from other people’s piles,” she says.
“What’s the harm? You’re saving things from ending up in the trash, and I find it’s such an achievement.
While leaving junk on the curb without a hard rubbish booking is illegal, councils decide individually whether, once disposed of, items are fair game for salvaging.
Many don’t actively ban it, but encourage residents to recycle or re-home before placing items on the street. Others have local laws prohibiting the practice, and threaten fines of a few hundred up to several thousands dollars related for scavenging on safety grounds.
But the fines are rarely issued, and rely on residents self reporting culprits.
“Sometimes you’re walking down the street and it’s exactly the thing you need … it appears just like fate.”
Lenne is finishing a furniture course and is used to repurposing items into something new, but wants hard rubbish collecting to be more widely accepted.
“People don’t know how to dispose of things, and a lot of the time it can be confusing and hard to find the right information,” she says.
Chris Anders has perfected the art of salvaging since he used to set up empty wool packs in frames in the Wimmera, for locals to fill with aluminium cans and plastic bottles.
Working as a scrap dealer, he’d then sell the cans and transport the five cent deposit containers to the South Australian border.
Anders now runs an antique store in regional Victoria and runs his own YouTube Channel – ‘the Ultimate Recycler’. He hasn’t done a load of general rubbish to the tip in 15 years.
“I’ve always liked fixing rather than throwing out,” he says.
“I got involved in recycling before people even had recycling bins”.
Anders says his love of hard rubbish was hardwired in him by his parents, who grew up in the Great Depression and used to wash plastic bags and dry them over a wood stove to reuse them.
“That’s the culture they grew up in – waste not, want not,” he says.
“You can discover things you never would have before.”
