Myall Lakes MP Stephen Bromhead has announced that Great Lakes Council’s waste facilities in Tea Gardens and Tuncurry has received $1,080,614.00 to expand and enhance its recycling infrastructure to increase its capacity to recycle.

The NSW Government funding, under the Resources Recovery Facility Expansion and Enhancement grants program, is from the NSW Environmental Trust.

Mr Bromhead said Great Lakes Council would receive the funding to install glass crushing plant at the Tuncurry Material Recovery Facility (MRF) to process an additional 9,600t tonnes per year of bottle glass sourced from municipal kerbside services and 2,500 tonnes per year of commercial plate and laminate materials sourced from glass and glazing businesses in the Mid Coast region.

While at the Tea Gardens facility, Australian Native Landscape (ANL) project will process 18,000 tonnes per annum of wood waste currently destined for landfill at its licensed facility in Tea Gardens (in addition to the 12,000 tonnes per annum of wood waste ANL received grant for in 2014).

ANL will source pallet waste, timber offcuts, fence palings, selected tree waste and other wood waste streams from regional transfer stations, landfills and waste management facilities.

The wood waste will be de-contaminated, ground to particle size, screened, coloured and packaged for market.

The project will complement the existing wood waste operations on site and alleviate stress placed on landfill assets in the region.

“This investment is just one of many the NSW Government is making to modernise waste and recycling infrastructure in NSW and improve the capacity for resource recovery,” Mr Bromhead said.

“The government has set an ambitious target of diverting 75 per cent of waste from landfill by 2021.

“To achieve this we are expanding kerbside collections to create a new network of community recycling centres and improve the infrastructure at waste facilities to enable them to recover more recyclable materials.”