The Victorian Minister for Environment and Climate Change Ryan Smith
The Minister for Environment and Climate Change Ryan Smith is continuing to drive improvement in Victoria’s recycling efforts announcing an $11.5 million funding package to improve recycling infrastructure across the state.
It follows $13.8 million of infrastructure funding already announced this year as part of the Victorian Coalition Government’s Conserve Invest and Save strategy.
This latest funding package includes:
• $5 million for Round 2 of the Driving Investment in New Recycling (DINR) fund through grants and;
• $6.5 million for Resource Recovery Infrastructure (RRI) at landfills, which will target large scale projects.
“We are continuing our reinvestment of the landfill levy back into the waste management industry to improve our capacity to sort and recover resources that would otherwise be sent to landfill,” Mr Smith said.
“This new funding package will help construct new facilities and upgrade existing infrastructure that makes sorting our waste at landfills or resource recovery centres more effective.
“Funding will be available to local government, private industry, waste management groups and non-profit organisations working in recovery and recycling,” Mr Smith said.
“We want to retrieve more material from the municipal waste stream and we want to help recover and process more of the commercial and industrial waste, such as cardboard, metals, plastics, glass and timber that is going to waste in our landfills.
“The waste system was an undervalued part of the Victorian economy under the former Labor government. The Coalition Government is proud to support the sector’s development which will have tangible environmental benefits.”
The programs will be offered through a two-stage assessment process, an Expression of Interest (EOI) phase followed by a detailed application from successful EOI applicants. The phase one EOI will be open for application in late July 2012.
