Household rubbish has come under unprecedented scrutiny, with Victorian councils filming bin contents and conducting secretive audits and inspections.
Privacy advocates are questioning the big brother tactics of waste authorities.
But councils, under pressure to cut rising landfill bills, insist surveillance is a vital part of their bid to educate residents about recycling.
Ratepayers Association of Victoria president Jack Davis said residents were largely unaware of the attention being paid to their rubbish.
But industry experts predict the hi-tech vigilance will only increase, and will result in micro-chipped bins and even detailed dossiers about individual households.
Victorian councils, including Monash, Stonnington, Moonee Valley, Latrobe, Melton, Greater Dandenong, Frankston and Port Phillip are using cameras fitted to pick-up trucks to film contents of recycling bins.
Many also conduct random waste audits, where households' recycling and green bins are collected for analysis.
Peter Chudek, from the Calder Regional Waste Management Group, said audits helped create "a clearer picture of community recycling habits". He said the recycling bins of about 200 households per municipality were "picked apart and measured".
"People don't know they are part of the audit ... because we don't want to pre-empt the audit," Mr Chudek said.
"We are still researching how to motivate people to do the right thing."
Gippsland Regional Waste Management Group executive officer Matthew Peake said privacy was paramount during audits: "Everything is disposed of, and the people who are involved in it realise they can't be going through people's private business."
However, Liberty Victoria president Michael Pearce, SC, said during both the auditing and filming processes, councils risked overstepping privacy boundaries, and that residents had little recourse.
"There's obvious potential for privacy breaches," he said.
~ more... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment