Waste contractors could spend up to nine months cleaning up rubbish if a kerbside collection plan was introduced across Shellharbour, according to council documents.
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At a Shellharbour council meeting last month, councillors asked for a report on the possibility of a one-off kerbside collection across the whole LGA conducted prior to November.
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It would replace the on-call collection now offered, which costs residents $100 but is heavily subsided by council.
The report stated contractor Remondis would have to hire extra staff and vehicles for the expanded kerbside collection, a process which would take at least two months.
After that point it would take almost a year to collect all the rubbish and cost council around $5.3 million.
"It is estimated that 150 properties could be serviced per day, five days per week, which could see the program last up to approximately nine months - December 2021 - August 2022 inclusive - if the entire 28,600 properties in the LGA took up the bulky waste collection service," the council papers stated.
The long timeframe was, in part, due to the Remondis COVID-safe policy of having one driver per vehicle
The report also noted a 2018-19 kerbside collection study by the Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation and the University of Wollongong found around 85 per cent of bulky goods collected ended up in landfill.
This would result in a 15 per cent increase in material sent to the Dunmore waste facility.
That study also found up to 70 per cent of items could be reused or repurposed by other households.
The report suggested council or Remondis could separate materials and recover those items that could be recycled but that would require all collections to use flat-bed trucks.
Taking that approach "would be highly time and cost-inefficient, and would result in the program taking a substantially longer time and costing substantially more."
Councillors will vote to accept the report's findings - but not implement kerbside collections - at Tuesday night's council meeting.
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