BALLENDEAN’S Paul Hayes is the latest winner in the Southern Downs Regional Council MY SDRC App promotion.
Paul, won a Can-O-Worms worm farm as the June winner of the competition after downloading the App to lodge a request to council via the “Fix It” page.
“I used it to tell council about blackberries near my place,” he said.
“With the App, it was very quick. You can take a photo and send it off, straight away.”
Paul said he would continue to use the App in future, because it was more efficient than phoning or coming into council offices and the response from council was fast.
“Living at Ballandean, you’re 20 minutes from town. This is better. It doesn’t matter where you are on the Southern Downs, you can use the App to report incidents to council without going into town,” he said.
Southern Downs Mayor Tracy Dobie said that some of the prizes handed out in the promotion had been purposely selected to encourage re-use, reduction and recycling of every day waste.
“I’m rather passionate about changing the way our community disposes of rubbish.
“Recent figures presented to me indicate that domestic waste generated in the Southern Downs is in the order of 1.8 to 1.9 tonnes per person, per year.
“I think we need to do something about that, we need to change old habits. There’s not very much these days that cannot be recycled and recycling can start right at home through composting food scraps.” Mr Hayes said he and his wife recycle everything where possible.
“We recycle our paper and plastics and everything at the Ballandean transfer station,” he said.
Just recently he and his wife had been talking about purchasing a worm farm so they could recycle their food scraps to make liquid fertiliser for a new vegetable garden they had built.
“This is wonderful! You’ve made my day! The worm farm will become an extension of our vegie patch,” he said, when he found out what he had won.
Mayor Dobie said that last month’s prize couldn’t have gone to a more deserving resident.
“It’s really nice to know that residents are trying to reduce, re-use and recycle wherever possible. “Paul and his wife are good examples of what we want to encourage people in our region to do,” she said.
Southern Downs manager Environmental Services, Mr Tim O’Brien, said that composting food scraps through the use of a worm farm or compost bin was a great way to minimise your waste footprint and has multiple benefits.
“Turning food scraps into worm liquid and castings is like gold on your garden. It’s cheap to do and it helps to reduce landfill which will save us all money in the long term.
“We need to encourage more recycling now because once our landfills are full we face a very large and expensive dilemma,” he said.
Prizes will continue to be won each month until the end of the year. To enter, simply download the MY SDRC App for free from the Play Store (Android) or App Store (Apple) and submit a request selecting the “MY SDRC App Promo 2-2016” category type. Don’t forget to enter your name and contact details to be in the running.
