What is in the red lid bin: eight years of NSW kerbside residual waste audits
Prepared by Rawtec. Analysis of 13,437 household residual waste bins audited across 64 NSW councils in the waste levy area, 2011 to 2019, covering about 87% of the state’s population. The original is on the NSW EPA website.
Summary published
Councils pay to collect and dispose of the red lid bin. This analysis shows what is in it.
Rawtec pulled together eight years of kerbside audits from 64 NSW councils, standardised them across different auditors and methods, and adjusted for collection frequency so they could be compared.
The state average red lid bin weighs the same as it did in 2011. The regional averages have moved.
Per bin per week, the same as 2011
Of the red lid bin is organics
Is dry recyclables with a kerbside bin already available
Could go in an existing bin where full services exist
What the audits found
Residual waste per bin, and what it is made of
Overall residual waste stayed at 10.1 kg per bin per week, identical to 2011. Underneath that, Sydney Metropolitan rose from 10.2 to 11.7 kg, the Extended Regulated Area fell from 10.2 to 9.3, and the Regional Regulated Area fell from 9.9 to 8.0. The report reads this as council initiatives in the two non-metropolitan regions reducing what residents put in the bin.
Organics make up 50.8% of the bin, or 5.2 kg per bin per week. Paper and paper products are 18.4% (1.9 kg), plastics 12.7% (1.3 kg), glass 3.2%, ferrous metal 2.2%, non-ferrous 0.7%, and the remaining 12.0% covers hazardous, building, earth-based, e-waste and miscellaneous material.
Organics in the wrong bin, with and without a FOGO service
Households with a food and garden organics service disposed of 6.5 kg per bin per week. With a garden organics only service it was 10.6 kg. With no bin-based organics service at all it was 14.9 kg.
By region: Sydney Metropolitan 46.2% (5.4 kg), Extended Regulated Area 36.8% (3.4 kg), Regional 32% (2.6 kg). By service: with FOGO 24.8% (1.6 kg), with garden organics only 41.2% (4.3 kg), with no organics service 53.6% (8.0 kg).
Bin size, and the growth in plastics
Households with 140 litres or less of weekly residual capacity disposed of 8.9 kg per bin per week. Households with a 240 litre weekly bin disposed of 14.6 kg. The report notes that education, how long the service has run and dwelling size were not assessed and also influence behaviour.
Plastics went from 10.5% of the bin in 2011 to 12.7% in 2019, and rose in every region. Paper stayed broadly flat at around 1.9 to 2.0 kg per bin per week.
What to be careful about with these numbers
Kilograms per bin per week is based on the bins that were audited, not the number of households visited to collect them. It is not adjusted for presentation rate, so it is not a household generation rate.
Several breakdowns are flagged in the report itself as low-sample and to be treated with caution. No council in the dataset ran both a FOGO service and a 240 litre weekly residual bin, so that combination is simply unknown.
The 2019 analysis introduced an ‘other organics’ category that did not exist in 2011, which affects direct comparison across the period.
52% of the data came from bin-by-bin audits and 48% from aggregated audits, standardised across auditors to make them comparable.
Related reports
The organics side of the same dataset.
The full report breaks every figure down by region, bin size and organics service type.
Working on something like this?
Most of our projects start with someone inside an organisation who already knows what needs to change and needs the evidence to back it in. If that is you, we would like to hear from you.