Upskilling councils with the tools to go circular

Circular Economy 101 For Victorian Councils

Tuesday, 31 October 2023

Presented by:

Moderator: Kate Shaw, Program Lead, Circular Economy Councils Fund

Keynote Speaker:

Florian van den Corput
Senior Advisor, Circular Economy

Katherine Ponton
Senior Advisor, Recycled First

Lachlan Johansen
Bayside City Council

Angus Howlett
Sharing on behalf of East Gippsland Shire Council

Kate Shaw::

Good morning everyone. My name is Kate Shaw. I’m the Program Lead for the Circular Economy Councils Fund at Sustainability Victoria. It’s wonderful to have you here today. The webinar format of this meeting means we can’t see your faces, but I can see your names logging in and it’s so great to have you here. We’d love to hear from you throughout this meeting in the chat and we also have a Q&A box open throughout the meeting if you have some focus questions for one of our presenters. We’d love to have your questions pop into there.

In commencing our meeting I want to firstly acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands we are all joining from across Victoria. So Sustainability Victoria recognises that we have a great deal to learn about sustainability from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and I want to pay our respects to them today. This artwork on the screen there is from a Melbourne-based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artist Safina Stewart. And what this piece is reflecting is a sea turtle navigating its ocean course guided by the Southern Cross in the white dots around it. So this work the artist says is particularly honouring the cultures and people from the Pacific and Torres Strait. We pay our respects today.

So just letting you know this session is being recorded and it will be sent to those who’ve registered. And we’ve got the Q&A box there for questions and the chat is also open there as well. I’ll introduce the team. So I’ve mentioned I’m Kate Shaw, the Program Lead for the Circular Economy Councils Fund. And we are lucky to have Florian van den Corput, Sustainability Victoria’s Senior Advisor of Circular Economy presenting today to us for about 30 minutes on Circular Economy 101. We also have with us Katherine Ponton who will be a familiar face to many of you from the Recycled First team. She’s our Senior Advisor there. And she’ll be helping with the Q&As following Florian’s session.

And following that we have two councils sharing with us who have both actually been recipients of the CE Councils Fund, feasibility and implementation round. We have Bayside and East Gippsland sharing with us today. And I’ll introduce them properly at the time. Then following that Katherine will help share around any questions that have popped up in the Q&A box for councils and right at the end we’ll have a quick Slido link for your feedback which is really important to us. And so looking forward to the session and I’ll hand over to Florian now for his Circular Economy 101 presentation. So don’t forget throughout to put your questions in the Q&A box and he’ll attempt to answer them afterwards. Thanks so much Florian.

Florian van der Corput:

I’ll do my best with the questions. Thank you Kate. I’ll just share my screen as well. Just bringing that up.

Kate:

In the chat Katherine is popping up our grant recipients list for our CE Councils Fund over the past few years. So you’ll have a snapshot of programs that have been done with other local councils across Victoria. Thanks Katherine. Thanks Florian.

Florian:

Thanks Kate. Let me know if you can’t see my presentation. It should be up right now. But if all is good let’s make a start. So Kate thank you again for the introduction. As you’ve mentioned my name is Florian and I’m the Senior Advisor on Circular Economy. I think that it’s fair to say that circular economy is increasingly becoming a buzz word today. I’m sure that most of you here have heard about it. Some of you might already be actively working on the circular economy. It’s also officially adopted in Victorian legislation and it’s also a focus area for Sustainability Victoria right now. But at the same time it’s also a fairly new concept I think it’s fair to say and circular economy is still often misunderstood we find. So it’s probably a good time that we have a chat about this.

So what I want to show you today is a shortened version of our Circular Economy 101 content that normally takes about an hour to get through, but I’ll run you through the most important bits today in about 30 minutes. So I’ll quickly touch upon what it is exactly, how the circular economy can be turned into action, and why it is important in the first place. So let’s get started.

We’ll start from the beginning to quickly go over what a circular economy is and what it is not. And as you can tell from this slide here the problem is that a circular economy doesn’t really have an agreed upon definition. It means a lot of different things. But let’s pick out a few things here. Now as the name suggests, a circular economy refers to an economic system, and this is why it’s not just a waste management strategy for example, because it goes way beyond that. It refers to a model of how we produce and consume stuff, about how we use our resources in a sustainable way. So it’s not just about waste and recycling. It’s also about design. It’s about manufacturing. It's about business models, consumer behaviour and everything that sits around that.

And transitioning to a new system like that really is a whole of society kind of thing. So it’s definitely not something that is the responsibility of just the waste sector, of just individual councils or Government. We will all need to play a role in facilitating that change. The circular economy really gives us a framework on how we can use our resources, our materials, in a sustainable way. And it’s become increasingly important that we do so because of issues like climate change, emissions, pollution, but also things like supply chain uncertainty, materials that are running out. These are all problems that are directly or indirectly related to how we create and use our resources.

So if we take a closer look at how we use the vast majority of our resources today we can categorise that system as a linear economy. And the reason that we call it linear is because the mentality that underpins this system is one with a very clear beginning and an end. We take stuff and we use that stuff to make things, and then we throw those things away. We take, we make and we waste. So there’s a clear beginning and an end. And this is how we have done business for the last 100 years or so and it’s given us really the wealth and the prosperity we have today. We’ve never been richer, we’ve never been wealthier as a society.

But we now know that there are also some problems with this way of doing business. We know that making things requires energy and therefore produces emissions. So that’s not so great. Putting all of our discarded products into a big hole in the ground or in the ocean causes pollution and toxicity. Also, not great. And making products requires new materials and that results in mining, in drilling, in digging, which destroys local ecosystems. Again, not so great. So, when the economy is relatively small none of these environmental impacts are that much of a problem to be honest. Global ecosystems are able to regenerate and rebalance. So, if you cut down a tree or two you won’t destroy a forest. But we are now getting to a point where our society and our economy have grown so much that we are actually hitting some limits. So, where the logging of a few trees might be fine, if you cut down the whole forest that means that it’s never coming back. And those limits that we are hitting are called the planetary boundaries.

I’m sure that most of you will have seen this image before and it shows the nine planetary boundaries that we really should not be exceeding. But as you can tell from our progress over the years it’s not looking so great. We’re emitting too much, we’re polluting too much, and we’re overshooting our limits so much that the planet cannot recover fast enough to keep providing us with the stuff that we need. And the evidence is now also pretty clear about the fact that the health of the planet and its ecosystems are directly related to the health of us humans as well.

So, what this tells us is that we really should be doing things a little bit differently, and that of course is where a circular economy comes in. So, when you look at this graphic over here, the trick lies in closing that gap at the very top of the circle so that it becomes a fully closed loop. But this is obviously an oversimplification but in essence that is what it is all about. Transitioning to a circular economy means that we do everything we can to close that loop, to turn the take, make, waste mentality into a take, make, reuse mentality or a repair mentality or a recycle mentality, whatever we need to do to close that loop. And we can do that by striving for three distinct principles. First of all we need to circulate products and materials at their highest possible value so that we keep them inside the system. And when we do that we effectively eliminate waste and pollution. Waste is really what happens when materials lose their value and they fall out of the system. So when we go circular, waste and all of its side effects such as pollution, they will simply go away. And this is how we end up with this system where we can use our resources to build our economy, but do that in a way so that we can regenerate the natural systems that we rely upon.

So this is where I hope you’ll agree with me that this circular economy thing is a fair bit more than just recycling or resource recovery. Doing these things, keeping materials in use, getting rid of waste and regenerating nature, those are ambitious goals that will require stuff to be designed differently, stuff will need to be sold differently, stuff will need to be used differently, and we need to find ways to make and consume products in a sustainable way, way before the word ‘waste’ even comes to mind.

So how do we do that then? If we look at circular economy in practice, what does this look like? Unfortunately there are 1,001 different ways to do circularity and it is of course far beyond the scope of this session to give you all a roadmap on what that might look like for you. So what I will give you instead is a look at circularity in action that is sector agnostic if you will. I will give you an overview of five different approaches that you can use regardless of what materials you work with, regardless of what businesses you work with, and I’ll show you some examples as well.

Now these five approaches that I’m talking about are narrow, slow, close, regenerate and inform. And they’ve been adapted from the Circularity Deck which was developed by Dr Jan Konietzko from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. And in fact if we were to take all of the circular solutions that are currently in play globally we will find that every single one of them makes use of one or a combination of these five approaches. And some solutions even use all of them. And each single one of these approaches resembles a different lever that can be pulled to make things more circular.

So let’s take a closer look at each and every one of them. So our first approach to make things circular is called narrow. And we call it that because it’s revolving around solutions that narrow the flow of materials that go through our system. If we use less material we’ll have a smaller impact on the environment. We’d use less land, less energy, less water to produce stuff. And we’d create less waste as well. Putting this into practice could be as simple as just reducing how much we produce and consume. That would be a perfect way of narrowing our volume of materials. But of course that is not always an option. So what else can we use?

Another example is to think of lightweighting where you will literally do more with less material. And on the picture here you can see CLOS, cross laminated offsite solutions, that have recently been funded by our Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre and they are prefabricating parts of a building during construction. And that means that they can very closely control that construction process that results in better performance, less construction waste, and basically they’re doing more with less material.

Now another example is to offer products as a service rather than for ownership. The Brunswick Tool Library are supported by Merri-bek City Council and they offer tools for rent for example. So instead of you buying a power drill for example that will probably sit unused in your shed 99% of the time you can borrow it instead when you need it. And this way that same drill can be used by a whole group of people replacing the need for every individual to purchase a new drill instead. So in a way it increases the intensity of use of that product.

And this last example I wanted to add here is to show that narrowing is not just about the products. It’s also about transportation for example because that also adds to the impact of materials. The City of Parma in Italy, they are improving the distribution of food in urban areas by using clean vehicles and they’ve also developed an IT platform that optimises their delivery routes for efficiency for example.

Now if we look at our second approach to make things circular we call that slow because it’s focused on slowing down the speed at which materials flow through our system. You can imagine that if we use products for longer the total impact over their lifespan will be less. If we need to replace a product once every ten years rather than once every five years the total amount of material we need over say a 20 year timeframe would be halved. And in practice a lot of this comes down to durability. We could just make a product stronger by over-engineering it but the trade off with that is that we’ll need more material for that. So that’s not always an easy option.

So another example of this approach and action is repair and maintenance. Quite an obvious one because if you keep your stuff in good nick it will last much longer of course. The City of Porto in Portugal, they are working on Project Reboot where they help people repair unused or broken laptops so they can go back into circulation for example.

A company called Fairphone, they do something similar by offering smartphones that can be disassembled from the get go. So when your phone gets a bit slow after a few years you can simply upgrade the battery, upgrade the screen or some of the other components to make it good as new pretty much. And another example here is emotional durability where the aim is to create a connection between the user and the product so they actually want to keep it in use for longer. And the City of Prague in the Czech Republic, they have started a growing network of reuse points through the city and they are becoming popular spots for scoring vintage and collectors’ items in furniture or sports equipment that people actually want to keep in use forever because they are so cool from a bygone era.

Now if we look at a third approach to do circularity that’s called close which means that we’re closing the loop and using waste as a resource to make new products again. Now this is usually what most people think about when we mention the circular economy because it’s all about taking waste out of the equation, turning one product’s waste into another product’s feedstock basically. And the most obvious way of putting this into practice is recycling. So although recycling is only one of dozens of options in the circular economy, recycling does play an important role. But it’s important to mention that recycling is not just about materials. It’s also about other resources as well. South-East Water for example, they are one of Victoria’s water authorities and they operate eight water recycling plants across the state. And their systems make it possible to recycle water for agricultural use and sometimes even for residential use, for flushing your toilets for example.

And sometimes it’s simply impossible to recycle certain materials. The City of Aalborg in Denmark is home to a lot of wind turbine manufacturing. So they’re pretty familiar with the big turbine blades and they’re really hard to recycle. So instead they repurpose them into bike shelters as you can see in this picture. So they’re still closing the loop where recycling is simply too hard because of the material.

And in some cases like in the built environment materials last such a long time that recycling can become tomorrow’s problem. Most buildings will last at least 30 to 50 years so it’s very hard to say all right we’re going to recycle this because that will happen in somebody else’s lifetime basically. The City of Oslo in Norway, what they do is they maintain a database of demolition projects in the city so that these projects can serve as a material bank to reclaim and recycle the materials into new projects and helping put that recycling ability on the map.

On to our fourth approach. That is called regenerate. And that’s taking a slightly different approach by using renewable materials rather than non-renewable ones. Certain biological materials that can be grown, they can be used and then composted again into a fertiliser basically to help grow the next batch of materials. So that makes them renewable and regenerative but also perfectly circular if it’s done correctly. And that includes materials such as timber, wool, cotton and most food stuffs. But it’s important to keep these renewable materials separate from non-renewable materials because things like microplastics and toxic chemicals can ruin the composting process. Most of you are probably familiar with BioPak and they make food service packaging and they offer a composting service as well to make sure that these different materials will never mix.

Now we also know that food waste is a big problem but the majority of this waste is actually organic so perfectly suited for this regenerate approach. Nutri V was also recently funded by our Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre and they’re turning surplus veggies into powders and snacks. So that prevents them from going to waste in the first place. And again reducing contamination in organic materials is essential. So this business called Koh, they create cleaning products that are made from only natural ingredients. So they completely eliminate the chance for toxic materials in the mix to further support regenerative approaches.

And for our fifth and final approach to make stuff circular we call that inform which quite simply refers to the use of data to find ways to make our solutions more efficient, easier to repair or simply evident to last longer. In practice this looks a lot like the previous four approaches but supported by data instead. For example the City of Haarlem in the Netherlands, they require tenderers for capital works projects to fill out a form which captures information on their ecological circular impact for example. And this gives the city lots of information to enable better decision making in the future.

Another example of this approach and action is virtualisation where you would completely eliminate the need for a physical product with software. Spotify is a great example because they’re obviously reducing the need for new CDs to be produced. So as a council perhaps you can think of particular services that could be fully digital to do the same for example.

And another example here is the City of Brummen in the Netherlands as well, and they’ve built a town hall that can be fully dismantled and reused. So the architect developed a material passport which documents which materials were used, how they come together and how they can be dismantled for reuse in the future.

Now I hope that these approaches come across as pretty straightforward actually and that they make sense to you as well. The circular economy might be this big intimidating thing but everybody can look at ways to narrow, to slow, close, regenerate or inform their material usage. And I want to mention that there’s no hierarchy here either. You can mix and match what works for you. You can even pick all of these approaches at once if that makes sense for you. But one thing that I do want to touch upon quickly is what we discussed at the start which is that a circular economy refers to economic system. It’s important to realise that regardless of the approach that you take circular solutions require a circular system to work. If you want to procure more durable infrastructure for example you need suppliers capable of supplying that. If you want to recycle stuff you need the logistics to make that happen. Or if you want to switch to composting organics you need to have the facilities and the expertise to make that work. All parts of the value chain need to work together on this.

But I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed by that. It is not the responsibility of a single council or a Government to make that system change happen. It really is the shared responsibility of all of us. And this whole circular economy thing is really new so we’re all learning and figuring this thing out. But if we all work on taking small steps in the right direction momentum will build. We don’t need to be perfect. We don’t need to pick the perfect approach. But we do need to progress. So embrace that progress even if your final solution might only be circular-ish. So embrace becoming more circular-ish and show your sector how it’s done. Show Government that this is where we’re heading. Show your stakeholders that this is where the opportunity lies. And taking those small steps adds up and momentum that is so clearly building right now is the result. So go for circular-ish.

Now your next question might be why then. Circular economy sounds like it’s as important as it is complicated so what is the actual impact? Why should we be pursuing this? Well as mentioned at the start our linear way of working is causing some issues. We’re overshooting our boundaries. And we can start exploring what the impact of a circular economy will be by looking at our big emissions target which is net zero. When we speak of net zero that usually brings to mind the topic of energy. We need to stop burning coal, we need to stop burning gas and oil, and we need to switch to renewable sources of energy ASAP. That’s all very true but that is not the whole story.

When we look at how our global emissions are generated something interesting comes up. as you can see here only a little over half of our emissions are actually related to the generation and use of energy, our operational emissions. So even if we went all in on solar panels, wind turbines and hydropower, we’re still only addressing a little more than half of our emissions. The other 45% are related to extracting and using materials. There are embodied emissions. So yes renewables are essential in our journey towards net zero but we also need to address the other half of this pie. We need to reduce consumption. We need to slow down material use, close the loop, regenerate, inform. Sounds familiar by now I hope. A circular economy will help us address that other 45%.

And that’s looking at emissions but we’re also physically running out of materials because the earth can only provide so much in a sustainable fashion. Earth Overshoot Day has quantified the earth’s capacity to provide us with the resources and they’ve also quantified when humans have overshot this capacity. And if we look at Australia’s Earth Overshoot Day well that fell on March 23rd. So what this means is that if everyone on earth would consume materials the way we do here in Australia the earth’s annual supply of resources would run out on March 23rd which is just under four months into the new year. So if everyone globally were to live like this we would need a total of four planets to sustain this behaviour. I’m pretty sure that that’s a very big ask. So a circular economy helps us keep materials in the system so we don’t need as much new material.

Another issue I quickly want to highlight and this is an issue that some scientists estimate might become a bigger challenge than climate change in the years to come, is the loss of biodiversity. Research by the International Resource Panel finds that more than 90% of global biodiversity loss is caused by resource extraction and processing. A circular economy aims to keep materials in use so this need for resource extraction in processing will go down. And this graph here from Sitra shows the incredible positive impact that circularity can have on biodiversity. They even state that the transition to a circular economy would fulfil 28% of the progress needed to halt or even improve upon biodiversity loss. And as shown in the graph especially circular food and agricultural practices will have a massive impact on this.

But aside from all those environmental benefits we are talking about an economy system. So what are the economic benefits of doing this? We’ve established that the transition from a linear system to a circular one will require a lot of things to come together but what is the economic opportunity that we’re looking at? Well a circular economy offers a different way of creating value in the economy and research by KPMG, Accenture, New South Wales Circular (now Circular Australia) and Beyond Zero Emissions has indicated that if the food, transport and built environment sectors in Australia were to go circular that would represent an opportunity of $210 billion and 17,000 jobs by 2048. And if we would add in circular initiatives in the manufacturing and recycling sectors circular economy can create some 150,000 jobs by 2025 already if we take action quickly. It’s important to note that for every job in landfill the recycling sector’s able to provide 3.3 jobs. In Europe alone the recycling sector represents half a million jobs at the moment.

So as you can see a lot of this stuff actually stacks up. But that doesn’t take away the fact that it is new and as we’ve established today it’s quite complicated sometimes. So we are learning and experimenting. You are learning. I’m learning. Government is learning. So we can become more circular-ish together. But Sustainability Victoria and the Victorian Government are committed to develop the support that is needed to make that transition happen. So I want to end with a quick overview of some of the support that you can access right now from Sustainability Victoria. You are all familiar of course with the great work by Kate Shaw and her team with Victorian Councils but there are several other programs in train right now that can assist you as well with your circular journey.

CEBIC stands for Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre and are looking at reviving some of the grant rounds but this program can also support you with connecting to the right businesses or academics. There are networking events. There’s a lot of detailed information and learning opportunities on the CEBIC website. And there’s even the ability to schedule in one on one support meetings for example to ask specific questions. ResourceSmart Schools is a program focused on providing support for schools, teachers and kids because really that is where the next generation of our circular innovators can be found right now. They’re in school at the moment. So this program offers education resources and other support to help teachers get started with these topics in school.

And finally our Buy Recycled Service is primarily intended for Councils by supporting them with procuring recycled materials and products for their infrastructure and landscaping projects for example. The team run a directory with detailed information on where to find such products. They’ve got procurement toolkits, they’ve got standards and specifications, and they even organise events to bring problem solvers together.

So we have blazed through all of this on a very high level. There’s a lot to unpack here that will take a while to sink in I’m sure. But I hope that I’ve convinced you that the transition to a circular economy is a beneficial one but also quite a necessary one. And these five approaches here are really a useful guide to help you take small steps towards becoming more circular-ish and identifying things that make sense for your council or for your communities.

Now I believe we’ve got a little bit of time for questions but before we do so I want to quickly let you know that we want to go into much more detail than this in the future. We’d love to be able to provide more support on particular circular problems, how to develop circular business models, how to measure progress and so forth. But we do need to know if that’s actually of interest or not. So if that sounds like something you’d be interested in I’d request that you please scan this QR code to express your interest or you can reach out to me after the session. The QR code will take you to a landing page and ask for your email so that we can contact you with further content in the future.

So thank you very much for listening to me today and let’s continue with some questions if there are any.

Katherine Ponton:

Thanks Florian. Really great presentation. It’s the first time I’ve seen that, and it was really insightful. And great examples from all over the world. We’ve got a question in the chat here from Monique.

Q: Where did the statistics about the economic value of the circular economy come from?

One of your slides they’re referring to.

Florian:

Yeah. Very good question. That’s actually based on research by multiple organisations and it’s based on research by KPMG, Accenture, NSW Circular, Beyond Zero Emissions and a few other organisations that play on a global level. I would highly recommend for more detail about these statistics have a Google for KPMG’s circular opportunities work. I believe that that was completed in 2019 or 2020 and there’s a lot of great economic modelling that’s been done to really figure out how much is it actually going to mean for us. And the figures are quite astounding I think. So highly recommend looking that up.

Katherine:

Thank you. We’ve got a question here from Shannon Best about those five different models. Which of those five models do you see councils being most helpful in?

Florian:

That’s a good question. And I think that there is not really a best answer there. Those five approaches are really meant to be mixed and matched really and really it depends on what you as a council are working on. If you’re working on education for example, can you educate people and businesses in your community on how to tackle some of these approaches or perhaps you deliver certain types of services that can be digitised which is more the ‘Inform’ side. But if you provide your own infrastructure perhaps you can look at the ‘Close’ approach. Really there’s so many iterations and versions of how you can put these approaches into practice.

And I’ll also say and acknowledge that the line between these approaches is often quite blurry. And that’s on purpose. A lot of these approaches are meant to be really taken together and taken as a holistic approach. So, take one of them, take two of them, maybe take all of them. Whatever makes sense for you as a council and whatever I guess works with the services that you already offer or some of the projects that you’re already running. Whatever works there feel free to use any of them. I would also highly recommend to actually look up the Circularity Deck by Dr Jan Konietzko from which I have adapted these five approaches because the Circularity Deck is basically a deck of cards that helps people to come up with ideas in these approaches and they’ve put a lot of excellent examples on this as well. So highly recommend looking that up.

Katherine:

Great. Thanks Florian. Are there any other questions anyone wants to post either in the chat or the Q&A? Now is your time. Otherwise, Florian has very kindly said that anyone can follow up and contact him about the presentation or any other related questions. So I think there might be one more in the chat. Just the name of the circular economy deck Florian that you just spoke of?

Florian:

Yes. It’s called the Circularity Deck and it was developed by Dr Jan Konietzko from Delft University of Technology. I’ll put that in the chat as well just for reference.

Katherine:

I think I might have just found it. Wonderful. Okay. Thanks Florian. And over to you Kate.

Kate:

Thank you so much. That was really wonderful. As well as providing some really good technical information on the circular economy we really wanted to facilitate council to council sharing in this session. Because while we know that the challenges you face in your councils are unique and you’re each at a different stage in your circular economy journeys with your communities and your councillors and decision makers, there’s nothing like hearing from another council directly. So, we’re hoping you’re inspired by these presentations and ask questions in the Q&A box and the chat also. And so happy to introduce to you – I’ll introduce both at once and they can hand over to one another.

So first up we have Lachlan Johansen, the Circular Economy Programs Officer from Bayside Council. And then Lachlan will hand over to Angus Howlett who’s representing Nathan who’s managing the East Gippsland Circular Economy project. So, Angus is formerly of East Gippsland Shire. He managed the feasibility study funded by the Circular Economy Councils Fund and also was involved in the application for the implementation phase and is still working on the project just slightly outside of council now. So, we’ll hear from Lachlan first. You’ve probably got five to ten minutes each is great. And we encourage questions for both of these in the chat again as well. Thank you, Lachlan.

Lachlan Johansen:

Hey everyone. As Kate’s just mentioned my name’s Lachlan. I’m the Circular Economy Programs Officer at Bayside City Council and I’m here today to talk to you about a project that we’ve been facilitating at the council called the Bayside Roving Repair Program. As the name suggests it is a program that is getting our community to engage in that repair and reuse space. Before I get into the finer details, I thought it might be a great idea to give you sort of a picture of where we’ve come from and where we’re sort of going.

So back in 2021/22 Bayside Council went out to the community to engage with them to understand what their idea of the repair and reuse phase is within Bayside, what opportunities are in Bayside Council for repair and reuse, and just generally get a broad idea of that repair and reuse mentality. With the information that we collected we went out to all sorts of community groups such as healthy ageing groups, engagement events that were held at libraries and things like that where the community could come in and engage. We were able to turn that into a feasibility study.

There were a few key highlights from the feasibility study that I’ll touch on quickly here. One of them was being that there is a lack of options within Bayside. I guess that was no surprise, but it was nice to back that up with some data. The closest repair and reuse sort of café that was happening was in Port Phillip which is the next LGA along. And the other sort of key finding was that there was a local appetite. So, the community actually does want to engage but as the previous point stated there was a lack of options for the community to actually engage with them.

With this feasibility study we were able to apply for a small grant through the Circular Economy Fund which Kate just touched on earlier and move into the implementation phase which is the phase that we’re currently sitting in at the moment. If you want to head through to the next slide Kate that would be great.

So in the implementation phase of the program, we were wanting to do eight workshops that will have a roving sort of popup feel within our council. The reason that we’ve gone with the roving sort of popup sort of focus is that as I mentioned earlier that is no dedicated repair space within Bayside Council so roving sort of popup events sort of fit the mould and allowed us to sort of engage with all different types or parts of our community by sort of popping up events throughout the whole municipality. We wanted to increase the community’s understanding of repair. We also wanted to enhance the community’s capacity to repair.

As I’ve previously mentioned there wasn’t a lot of options within Bayside and to give them the capacity to repair was definitely a focus. But also, a lot of the time these repair sort of events were run by volunteers or are run by volunteers and they don’t really have the capacity or time or funding to be able to really set up a solid repair event or workshops. And if we could sort of take some of that capacity away from them and do it ourselves that was definitely something that we were wanting to focus on as well.

Foster community connection. There are great circular economy outcomes from this program but there are also community connections to be made. So, we’ve run four workshops currently and we’ve had just people that have come along that have not brought any items in at all, are not a volunteer repairer at all. They’ve just come along to have a coffee, have a chat and connect with people from our community. A lot of the people that have been volunteering at our roving repair events have been older and for them to be able to come into these workshops and actually have a chat to people and connect with people that they normally wouldn’t has been really inspiring. There was one lady that came to an event that was a repairer and she mentioned that coming to these events made her feel really good because she felt really valued and important. So, community connection has been a secondary carry on effect that’s been really great.

And then of course we wanted a potential ongoing repair movement in Bayside whether that be an ongoing event that happens monthly, a repair space or a repair café would be the ultimate goal at the end. If you head to the next slide, please Kate.

So, we’ve planned eight events from late September all the way through to early Feb. Each event has been sort of planned or themed by the feasibility study’s findings and also by the repairers that we could find in our community. Pretty much out of these eights events six of these events are run by volunteers. So, we went out to the community after the feasibility study and were able to identify volunteer repairers that have come along to all of these events so far and helped us repair some items. Overall, the consensus from these repair events have been really, fantastic. We’ve currently run four events out of the eight and that’s been the Bayside roving repair launch event, the sewing workshop, the small electrical appliances and the make, mend, do, and skill sharing down the bottom here. And then we’ve got another four events that will happen at the end half of this year and early next year. If you go to the next slide Kate that would be great.

Overall, the events have been really, really well received by our community. Each event has had around 25 to 30 people attend on average. We’ve had around 100 items repaired so far from the four events that we’ve held. And if the items weren’t able to be fixed, we were able to sort of point the participant in the right direction on where they could potentially get the item fixed locally or if they couldn’t be fixed at all because it was too damaged were able to give them sort of advice on how to dispose of the item correctly as well.

As I mentioned it’s been a really positive experience. A lot of feedback that has come back from all the participants so far is how can we do this ongoing, it’s been a fantastic event, things like that. So hopefully we can definitely continue it in the future. But what next? So, after all of these events have been run there will be a reporting period in March and then the event ends. Well, that next? So Bayside Council recently has gone through a process of signing a new lease for their waste transfer station. It’s been a very long time running I guess you could say as the centre has been owned by a particular company for over 20 years and we’ve now been able to give the new lease to a new company called Future Recycling. And part of that lease negotiation was that we wanted a recycling shop or a tip shop to be there where community members can come and purchase recycled items. Or we also wanted to stipulate that we want a repair café set up where the community can come and bring items and run events on a regular basis.

So all of this information that we’ve gathered from the feasibility study, from the implementation side of the project will be able to go to the new contractor and let them know of the findings that we found, what worked, what didn’t, and really set them up to make sure that they have a really successful repair café within the waste and recycling centre here in Bayside.

But I’d just like to go to the next slide Kate and just say a big thank you to Sustainability Victoria for all of your advice and of course the funding. That’s been much appreciated. And we’ve been working with a company called Let Me Be Frank. I think Lucy, I saw you were in here earlier and a big shoutout to you guys as well. Thank you.

Katherine:

Lachlan we have one question in the chat for you just around how you funded the café and who is staffing it. Is it volunteers?

Lachlan:

So, it’s not a café. They’re sort of repair events and they’re all throughout different locations within our municipality. But it is funded through the Sustainability Victoria Circular Economy Fund. But again, a lot of the participants that have come along have been volunteers. So, they’ve generally just wanted to participate in the events that we’ve held. So, a bit of both I guess.

Katherine:

Great. Thank you, Lachlan. Any other quick questions in the chat or the Q&A?

A lot of great feedback on that presentation and those insights you just shared.

Wonderful. All right. I’ll hand over to – sorry. One more question Lachlan.

Lachlan:

All good.

Katherine:

Just a question if there is a council staff member present at the repair event.

Lachlan:

Yeah. I’ve been present at almost every event so far bar one just because of a clash. But there has been a council staff member present at every event so far.

Katherine:

Good to know. Thank you. All right. I’ll hand back over to Kate or directly to Angus.

Angus Howlett:

Perfect. Thanks Katherine. Hi everyone. So as Kate mentioned before I’m Angus. I was the coordinator of waste planning with East Gippsland Shire until earlier this year when I’ve moved to Melbourne and started working for myself in consulting but have been very lucky to stay involved with some of council’s projects including this one, the establishment of an organic waste processing facility in Bairnsdale. So next slide please.

So, council operates 18 transfer stations with 12 of them accepting garden organics and with a footprint of about 10% of Victoria it means East Gippsland collects quite a bit of GO at about 30,000 tonne a year. Just last month we’ve introduced a gate fee for the disposal of GO for the first time so we’re expecting to see a significant reduction in the volumes as a result. But as with all councils we’re going to have to start collecting FOGO at some point in the near future and so we naturally need somewhere to process it.

We were involved in a joint procurement process with the other five Gippsland councils through the WRRG but we didn’t see any benefit in signing a contract through that based on the offers that were presented. For a bit of scale, the closest existing commercial composting facility to Bairnsdale being the main commercial hub is about an hour and a half but that means it’s about four and a half hours from some of the further out areas of East Gippsland. We do have a very small-scale composting facility and FOGO collection already operating in Mallacoota and that’s been going for about ten years fairly successfully and we’re actually in the middle at the moment of a bit of an education relaunch campaign. Next slide please.

So, in 2021 we got some funding through the feasibility stream and we utilised that to deliver some trials, some composting trials on some council owned farmland adjacent to our landfill. We basically constructed a gravel hardstand with a bit of runoff collection to make sure we’re in line with the GED and then over 12 weeks we trialled four separate composting methods and collected temperature data daily, then had tests done in line with the Australian standard to check the compost quality. We were able to produce compost that was mostly in line with the standards. It missed on a couple of criteria but that was simple process control things that we are able to improve in the full facility. The data we gathered from that was really useful and it actually informed a big component of a master’s thesis into organic waste processing options for Australian LGAs and the material we produced was also shared with a local ag research group who used it for some trials comparing it to other fertiliser options with some very promising results. Next slide.

So off the back of the trials, we developed a business case for the establishment of a commercial scale composting facility. We scoped the facility based on several others that I visited around the country including Wangaratta and Geelong, and we’ve landed a forced aeration system with open windrow maturation. So, by including the forced air system we are reducing the likely over emissions and with that reducing the buffers we’re going to require.

The biggest challenge we generally face in East Gippsland in waste management is the area we cover but in this case, it’s worked really well in our favour in that we already own a 300 hectare parcel of land which has sufficient buffers for this kind of facility.

The initial estimates for the cost of the facility were about $6 million including all fixed and mobile plant and although there will obviously be operational costs on top of that by comparison, we were looking at over $1.5 million a year if we were to outsource the processing of the material, with a big chunk of that being transport.

Next slide please.

So, this is the proposed facility, our concept design. Since taking the business case to council we have engaged SMEC to deliver design of the facility. We’re currently in the process of developing a development licence application for EPA and we hope to have that submitted in the next month or so. Throughout the design process we’ve been consulting with current compost facility operators and other organic waste processes just to ensure the facility’s fit for task.

From the 25,000 tonnes of feedstock we’re expecting to produce around 15,000 tonne of mature compost which we expect to find demand for in the region and we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to continue partnerships with local research organisations to grow that market. And that’s our project at an overview. If anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out later or if you have them now.

Katherine:

Yeah. Does anyone have any questions and want to post them in the chat or the Q&A?

At this stage we don’t but thanks Angus. That’s also great projects to learn more about. There was just a question about the feasibility study being funded by Sustainability Victoria and yes it was through the round one of this fund.

If no more questions I’ll pass over to Kate.

Kate:

Wonderful. Thank you so much to both Lachlan and Angus for sharing two really different projects, really short of showing the spread that Florian shared – the diversity of projects that councils can undertake. You did a wonderful job in explaining them. And thank you to Angus as well for stepping in for Nathan who couldn’t present directly from East Gippsland at this time. But we want to keep the conversations going. We want you to feel free to email us any time, to keep talking with each other and sharing your findings and successes and keep building that network as you go. Keep the questions coming.

And also going to put in the chat – we’ve got a quick Slido which is a live poll. If you could click through and give us your feedback on the event because we really want to make these useful and really applicable to you and where you’re at with your councils. So grateful that you’ve joined us. But Katherine is there another question to pop in?

Katherine:

Yeah. If we’ve still got Angus. So there was a couple of questions for his presentation. Angus a question from Adrian about:

Q: Did you have any issues with plastic in that composted product?

Angus:

In the trials we didn’t but that was just because we used just the clean GO that we received at transfer stations. Obviously, we’re expecting it to be a fairly significant challenge when we get to introducing FOGO.

Katherine:

Sure. And a question from Adrian.

Q: Are emissions accounted for in this project?

Angus:

In construction or the actual composting process? Either way I guess through construction yes, in the same way that all of council’s capital works are. I haven’t done any work myself on how the emissions are going to be accounted for in the operation of the facility though.

Katherine:

Sure. Thank you. And a question from Toby.

Q: Does the new facility accept compostable liners?

Angus:

Based on the facility we’re running in Mallacoota the plan would be that we will accept compostable liners. Obviously, there’s big challenges with that and PFAS. So, like everyone still waiting to see what the regulations say. But at this point I would say for convenience and getting people on board we probably will be accepting liners.

Katherine:

Great. Thank you. And just to clarify the emissions question was about ongoing emissions accounted for in that project.

Angus:

Sure. To be quite honest I’m not quite sure what council’s plan will be with that once the facility’s operational. But I can certainly look to find out and get back to you.

Katherine:

Angus. Wonderful. I think that was all the questions. Thank you.

Kate:

Thanks so much for helping with the questions Katherine. That was excellent. And we really appreciate you sharing directly from councils Lachlan and Angus. That was wonderful. And Florian as well. It’s been fantastic to hear your expertise. We really appreciate it. And thank you for sending your email address out so that people can continue to contact you and hopefully they’ve come back to you a little with wanting to learn more and you’ll be in touch I’m sure.

I encourage you to click through that Slido to give us your feedback. We want to hear if you’ve learnt anything new. Totally fine if you haven’t. Was it useful, and what would you like to hear more on? We really want to continue to equip you. We’re all in this together and want to support you in your councils as we continue this circular economy journey together.

So I’ll leave it there and we’ll send out the recording of this. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time this morning.

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