Campaigns
As part of the Alliance’s commitment to reducing what gets sent to landfill, promoting a circular economy mindset is at the core of all that we do. A big part of the circular economy is to get more value from resources by giving new life to goods and materials. See below for the campaigns that we are actively working on and supporting.
Community Composting
In 2016-17, there was around 7.3 million tonnes of food wasted or lost in Australian homes, on farms and in manufacturing, with 3.2 million tonnes of this ending up in landfill.
How is food lost or wasted?
There are multiple points across the food system where there is food wasted and lost.
The cost associated with this food lost is not only economical but also environmental – it costs between $42- $102/ tonne to dispose of wasted food in landfill and while it slowly decomposes surrounded by plastic and other waste methane gases are produced, adding to our changing climate.
Across our three municipalities an average of 35% of landfill waste are organics.
Community Compost Hubs
Recognising that not everyone has time, the space, or the skills to compost their food scraps at home, a Community Compost Hub (CCH) is the next best thing to help keep food waste out of landfill.
Normally found in community gardens, a CCH is a publicly accessible facility where local residents can drop off their kitchen scraps for free to be turned into compost, aided by volunteers in that community garden.
CAWRS is in the process of constructing 10 of these community composting hubs at community gardens across Cardinia Shire, City of Maroondah and Shire of Yarra Ranges.
You can sign up to become a member of your nearest hub TODAY!
Repair & Renew
Repair Cafes
This part of the project is all about bringing back and supporting a social culture of repair and reuse. We will do this by running repair café sessions in collaboration with the members of the Alliance.
What is a Repair Cafe
A repair café is a community space where people bring their broken household items such as clothing, bicycles and furniture to be mended and brought back to life. These items are a big part of the unnecessary waste that ends up in landfills.
Did you know that 6000 kg of textile fabrics are dumped into landfills every 10 minutes in Australia?
We are aiming to repair over 300 items and save 864 kg from landfill.
Participants will also be able to learn new skills so they can carry out similar future repairs themselves.
Coffee Cup Recycling
In partnership with Closed Loop, we are installing Simply Cups collection sites where shoppers and coffee drinkers can dispose of their used paper-based coffee cups.
The collected coffee cups are then shredded and moulded into a series of products including outdoor benches, garden beds, bike lane separators and reusable coffee cups.
With this initiative, CAWRS is aiming to divert 55,200 cups per year from landfill.
We’re also aiming to help repurpose 100 kg of plastic from the coffee cup lids into higher end products
Workshops
Community Workshops
Over the course of the project we will run community workshops on avoiding, reducing and reusing waste at home and in the community. Workshops such as “How to Compost”, “Art from Waste”, “DIY products” and more. We hope these workshops will empower and build long term behavioural change amongst the community.
Learn skills to take simple steps towards participating in a circular economy and reducing waste in your day to day lives.
If you are interested in attending a community workshop, check out our events calendar.
School Workshops
We are offering a limited number of free workshops at secondary schools in the Cardinia, Maroondah and Yarra Ranges Local Government Areas, which will consist of activities about litter, recycling, and waste reduction.
The sessions support the Resource Smart Waste and Litter modules for participating schools, but all schools are eligible for three free workshops. Students have the opportunity to undertake a litter audit at the school and find innovative ways to address important litter and/or waste issues unique to their school.
Participating schools can compete for a free precious Plastics school workshop for the greatest amount of litter reduction at their school.
Want to get your school involved?
Video Diaries for Social Change
There are already knowledgeable people in the community doing the work of recycling, upcycling, composting and reducing waste. CAWRS aims to empower these leaders and share their stores as an inspiration on how to make the best of our resources.
Reducing the waste going to landfill doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s all about using what we have, thinking on the entire cycle, consuming less, and finding creative ways to give a second life to our “things”.
We celebrate the diversity of our sustainability leaders, sharing the knowledge from ten different cultural backgrounds, inspiring us to get into action and find our way of caring for our planet.
In these clips we hear from a diversity of citizens sharing with us their acts of conscious recycling, reusing and re-making.
Recognising that not everyone has time, the space, or the skills to compost their food scraps at home, a Community Compost Hub (CCH) is the next best thing to help keep food waste out of landfill.
