Waste management in residential and mixed use developments
Published by Zero Waste SA in partnership with Renewal SA and the Property Council of Australia, 2014. Rawtec was one of eleven organisations that contributed to its development. The original is on the Green Industries SA website.
Summary published
Apartment recycling fails for reasons that were decided at the drawing stage. This guide puts waste infrastructure on the plan at the same time as the other building services, with numbers to design to.
The headline ones: a common disposal point no more than 30 metres from a dwelling’s front door, transfer routes at least 1.25 metres wide at a gradient no steeper than 1:10, and four metres of vertical clearance wherever a collection vehicle has to go.
The four-metre clearance rules out most basement car parks for collection vehicles.
Maximum front door to common disposal point
Minimum transfer route width
Minimum vertical clearance for collection vehicles
Hard and e-waste per household per year
The numbers to design to
Storage minimums and generation rates
High density: 30 litres general waste, 25 recycling, 10 organics per bedroom per week. Medium density with a garden: 35, 30 and 20. Low density: 40, 35 and 40. A building of three-bedroom apartments needs a larger bin room than a building of studios.
0.77 cubic metres per household per year.Classify the development, and keep bins at ground level
A three-tier classification — Type A simple, Type B intermediate, Type C complex — then drives which waste management system is appropriate. The guide’s selection matrix does this against built form and site circumstances rather than dwelling count alone.
Bin storage areas should be at ground level to “minimise risks to persons and property”. Chute systems are treated as suited to specific built forms rather than as a default for towers.
Garden East: lighter lids and fewer bins
At Garden East in Adelaide, a traditional bin lid weighed about 2.7 kilograms. The modified lid-in-lid design weighs about 400 grams.
Garden East, 250 dwellings across eight multi-storey buildings, went from more than 150 bins to 59 by moving to 50 shared 660 litre bins.
What the guide gives you to work with
A staged checkbox assessment across planning, concept design and detailed design, so the waste system is reviewed at each gate rather than signed off once.
Required content set out in full: contact details, land use, system sizing, storage area description, stakeholder consultation, and how it will be operated and managed.
Matches built form and site circumstances to a Type A, B or C system.
Applies the per-bedroom rates with a worked example.
Marks each service as required, desired or optional for each land use — useful in a mixed-use building where the retail tenancy and the apartments need different things.
Aligned to AS4123.7-2006: dark green or black body throughout, with a red lid for landfill, yellow for commingled, lime green for organics and blue for paper and cardboard.
The guide is “not prescriptive and it is not a design manual”, and its generation rates are “for design purposes” assuming best practice participation levels which “may not occur until several years”. Figures are average or peak values and the designer has to decide which applies. Contractor service availability may be limited in regional areas. Zero Waste SA, Renewal SA and the Property Council “are not liable and accept no responsibility for any claim, loss or damage”. This is a 2014 document and the Australian Standards and planning framework it references have moved since.
Related work
Other better practice guidance on managing waste in a building.
The full guide runs to about 43 pages including six appendices, the Waste Management Plan template and the worked generation rate example.
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