Resource Recovery Facility

The Mindarie Regional Council (MRC) is a regional local government which undertakes waste processing activities on behalf of its constituent member councils, the Cities of Perth, Stirling, Joondalup, Wanneroo and Vincent, and the Towns of Victoria Park and Cambridge.

This encompasses roughly one third of Perth’s population and the MRC handles over 180,000 tonnes of waste per year on behalf of these residents.

The MRC was until recently a party to a 20-year waste processing agreement with BioVision 2020 Pty Ltd (BioVision) which commenced in 2009. Under the agreement, BioVision processed 100,000 tonnes of waste per year for the MRC at the Resource Recovery Facility (RRF) in Neerabup, extracting the organic material from the largely unsorted waste stream for beneficial use.

To date, the processing facility and the contract have operated well and have diverted over 600,000 tonnes of waste from landfill.

With the introduction of the State’s Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Strategy 2030 (WARR Strategy), there is a clear change to the way in which organics will be separated and sorted at the household level through the use of a third bin for Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO). 

A number of the MRC’s member councils have been progressively providing Garden Organics (GO) bins to their residents as a transition step. The organics collected in these bins is currently being processed by external recyclers.

The change to organics handling in Perth, now and into the future, means that the RRF is no longer the most suitable processing infrastructure and technology for this material stream.
 
To this end, the MRC and BioVision mutually agreed to terminate their processing agreement with effect from 31 August 2021. The MRC has taken ownership of the facility and is currently assessing how best it can be used in the future.

In the next 12 to 24 months, the MRC and its member councils will continue to align their practices with the WARR Strategy and will move toward more progressive processing options for both organic and residual materials.

The MRC is committed to processing waste as high up the waste hierarchy as possible and is constantly evaluating better ways in which to do this, in a way that is most beneficial to ratepayers.

Media may contact Scott Cairns, Chief Executive Officer on 0497 856 885.