General News
13 October, 2025
Waste group kicks off at Riverfest
A NEWLY-formed waste action group, supported by the Johnstone River Community Gardens, will pitch a marquee at this year’s Riverfest in Innisfail to spread the message about reducing waste and talk with locals about ways to get involved with this important issue.
Group coordinator Liz Fabian said there were many ways locals could become ‘trash warriors’. “We aren’t here to parrot the messaging from council or government – we want to encourage locals to reduce waste at home and work, where it starts,” she said.
“This means looking at ways of managing waste outside of government. Their role sits between where waste starts and where it ends up. Blaming the waste issue on the council or the government is another way of saying ‘not my problem’ and this just ends up with more government charges and bureaucracy to clean up after us.
“Communities down south are successfully doing things for themselves and we’d like to import a lot of that knowledge up here, to play catch up and even show the lead in our region.
“I have recently been to Victoria and toured a number of events and facilities. Not all solutions are suitable for FNQ but, just for starters, it is entirely possible for us to get the machinery to repurpose plastic lids into reusable items right here on the Cassowary Coast as a boutique industry.
“The WAG group is aware that many people are struggling in the region with the new recycling scheme. They point to Cairns’ experience where it took around three years to overcome the contamination issue and is now seeing 100% of waste from Cassowary Coast recycling bins trucked to Cairns, only to be off-loaded and declared contaminated, and then loaded onto Cairns’ Viola trucks, to be trucked up the Kuranda Range to Mareeba’s general waste tip,” said Ms Fabian.
“This isn’t about net zero and being a Greenie. It is about the massive burden to manage and transport waste that is going to cost us more and more each year. We owe it to ourselves and our beautiful region to cut down on our own waste and find better solutions than sending it to Mareeba to forget about.”
For further information, please email the group at activ8.innisfail@outlook.com
Read More: Innisfail