The Metropolitan Waste and Resource Recovery Group (MWRRG) invites you to make a valuable contribution to help inform an upcoming collaborative procurement for recycling sorting services.

The metropolitan councils of Melbourne have a continuing and growing need for kerbside commingled material sorting services. These services to councils are currently provided by a small number of material recovery facilities (MRF) and often under individual contracts.

The recent service continuity issues and consequent diversion to landfill of commingled recycling in Melbourne have highlighted the need for fundamental change in the recycling services industry to develop an industry capable of responding to market variations and to provide councils with a continuous and commercially viable service. Councils recognise the need to work more closely with the recycling industry to achieve these objectives.

In 2018 the Victorian Government released the Recycling Industry Strategic Plan (RISP) for the development of a safe, resilient and efficient recycling system in Victoria, where kerbside recycling services continue to be provided to households.

A component of the RISP is to use a collaborative procurement approach to fundamentally change the way the recycling industry in Victoria operates.

Additionally, the Victorian Government has also announced financial incentives for new infrastructure and for upgrades to existing infrastructure to encourage new investment in the recycling sector.

In the context of the RISP, MWRRG is designing a collaborative procurement for recycling sorting and recovery services on behalf of the Melbourne metropolitan Councils. This procurement seeks to increase competition in the recycling sector through the aggregation of the kerbside commingled material collected by Melbourne’s councils to support a sufficient number of recycling facilities to meet council’s needs.
To inform the design of this procurement MWRRG will run a Request for Information (RFI) to the recycling services industry to understand the capacity and interest of industry service providers to:

sort commingled kerbside recycling into saleable commodities
establish and maintain viable local and international markets for these commodities
introduce new and innovative sorting technologies
MWRRG also wants to understand:

how different kerbside separation options will affect the sorting process
the needs of the customers of the recycling industry regarding the quality of the product received and how this might be influenced directly by the MRFs and by Council initiatives such as source separation at kerbside collection.