In recent months, Council has conducted a number of surveys in individual rural communities to gauge attitudes towards roadside waste collection services. Council currently maintains recycling stations at strategic points throughout the shire, but several communities have expressed concerns in the face of abuse of these facilities, some of which have simply become public dumping grounds for passers-by. From Council’s perspective, contamination of recyclables with general waste was also defeating the entire purpose of its effort to encourage recycling.
In 2011, in an effort to address this problem of illegal dumping, Council conduced surveys in the Royalla and Burra/Urila areas to canvas community opinion and gauge support for a trial of a roadside collection service. Following a positive response to these initial surveys, Council ran a roadside collection trial to assess the practicality of such a service in these rural residential areas.
A follow-up survey showed that response to the trial in Royalla was almost unanimously positive, with 99.1% support for continuation of the service and 88.0% support for extending this to include full domestic waste collection. The results in Burra/Urila were also very positive, with 88.6% in support of continuing the recycling collection service, and 62.2% in favour of a full domestic waste collection service.
These surveys showed a 45-50% response rate, and even on these relatively small populations, this provides a statistical confidence level of 95% with an accuracy of 5-6%, a conventional goal for survey responses. This means that, for example, we can be 95% confident that support for roadside collection services in Royalla is in the range 83.0%–94.0% across the whole community.
In response to this feedback, Palerang Council will commence a full domestic waste collection service in Royalla from July 2012, and introduce a similar service in the Burra/Urila area in July 2013.
Surveys conducted in Carwoola and Sutton East showed 58.0% and 69.1% support respectively for recycling collection services, which are now also scheduled to begin in July 2012. (Please note that the results presented here for these two surveys are slightly different to those presented in the relevant reports to Council, as they include responses that were received after the formal cut-off date for the survey. While the additional responses lower the overall level of support slightly, they do not change the ultimate result.)
It is worth noting that Council also surveyed the Bywong/Sutton East/Wamboin communities in 2009, to test their reaction to a proposal to close the existing landfill site on Macs Reef Road, and introduce roadside collection services. On that occasion, the communities overwhelmingly rejected the proposal with 75.2% support registered for the establishment of a waste transfer station at the landfill site, and Council has respected this preference.
The actual data collected in conjunction with all of these surveys, as well as summaries of the results and various statistics, can be viewed by clicking here.