Brisbane Waste & Recycling

Brisbane Waste & Recycling

Brisbane City Council has four resource recovery centres at Chandler, Ferny Grove, Nudgee and Willawong with recycling and waste facilities.

Brisbane households generate many different types of waste – from food and textile waste to e-waste and hazardous waste.

Clothes, footwear, sheets, towels, blankets and household textiles are part of our everyday lives. When it comes time to dispose of these items, there are a lot of things you can do to keep them out of landfill and in circulation.

In Australia, each person generates approximately 20 kilograms of e-waste each year. As a result, Australians have become the fourth highest generators of e-waste per capita. E-waste can be recycled. Just over half of all e-waste is collected in Australia, with 80% of this going to low-efficiency recycling. This means that valuable resources (such as lithium and cobalt) in e-waste are not reused.

Recyclables are taken to Visy’s Material Recovery Facility (MRF) and are sorted into different categories – paper, cardboard, plastics, glass and metal. Any non-recyclable items or ‘contaminants’ are detected by the sophisticated mechanical sorters and removed.

Council collects recycling with dedicated recycling trucks. In 2017-18, Council collected approximately 90,000 tonnes of paper, cardboard, glass, plastic and metals from Brisbane households which were then sorted and prepared for reprocessing into new products and packaging.

Recycling is one of the easiest ways to contribute to environmental issues by helping to conserve water, reduce energy use, reduce greenhouse emissions, reduce reliance on landfill and conserve natural habitats.