Council needs to recycle

Council needs to recycle

We should all be concerned about the treatment of Ms Sandra Lobley for the way her employer apparently deals with the subject of recycling.

The Federal Government, the State Government and our local council, I hope, are all promoting recycling as a priority.

However that promotion has not reached everybody. Some companies, like Springmount Services and some revelers at night time.

I still don’t know why we are having the two chrome-plated containers standing next to each other all over the place, one for general rubbish and the other for recycling. These are provided by our council.

However, and here comes a surprise, even the council staff looking after those containers emptying them, seem not to know what they are supposed to do.

I have made the following observation:  On weekends early in the mornings an open tray truck is driven throughout Docklands and both the rubbish and recycling containers are emptied together on to that truck (with out any wind protection).

I have also observed in Merchant St during a weekday: A council dump truck stopping next to the two bins there and the driver tipping the content of both bins into his dumper.

I don’t think that when those trucks return into their depots, that there are people waiting there to sort all that mess out. It will most likely end up in the land fills or in furnaces.

I admire the stand of Sandra Lobley and ask her, to keep up the good work.

Karl B

 

An unmitigated disaster

Today (a beautiful one) a friend and I wandered around Docklands for a couple of hours – something I’ve done at least 15 or 20 times in the last 10 years.  When I say that I think the best it has ever looked was before the site was cleared, and then when it was completely cleared, you would probably think I am joking.  The tragic thing is, I’m not.

The development of Docklands has been one continuous disappointment.  From the moment the large stadium went up, cutting the city off from the river, a once in a lifetime opportunity to connect to the river was lost.  And the lack of vision and sensitive planning which has blighted the whole project has continued ever since.

Basically Docklands was divided into areas, each given to developers who were told to develop.  What developers do is build tall buildings.  There is so much more to planning than just putting up tall buildings.  Where are the transport routes - private (cars etc), public (even the tram routes that were built are now being altered as testament to how badly they were initially laid out), bike and walking tracks (not in any thought-out way), parks, gardens, lawns, areas for relaxation (forget it).

I can imagine the whole place with the waterfront being treated as a foreground to friendly walking and bike tracks, to lawns and garden beds, with music and drama stadia, with public statuary, with children’s playgrounds, and so on, all to the water’s edge.  Then, say, low-rise restaurants, public facilities like crèches, library, art galleries and the like.  Behind these would be road and transport routes, and then, where appropriate, the tall buildings for office, private dwelling and public use.  This is the sort of planning seen in so many other places - some in this country, many elsewhere (think the south side of the Brisbane River, both banks of the Torrens in Adelaide, and the Swan in Perth, for example).

But to repeat myself, none of these things exist in the present Docklands, except tall buildings, in most places almost to the water’s edge, and in others separated by vast uneven, bare, windswept concrete expanses.  I’ve yet to speak to anyone (apart from the self-interested) who sees Docklands as anything but an unmitigated disaster.

On pp 16 and 17 of your Issue #63 you have two photos entitled “What a difference 10 years makes to our fledgling suburb.  Until I read the labels, I was hard-pressed to guess which was the later version.  I still don’t see the “Now” picture as any more attractive than the “Then” one.  There’s virtually no greenery visible in either, and no feeling of a harmonious, well-thought-out precinct in the now one.  It’s really tragic.

Is it too late?  Probably.  But the only hope the place has is to stop putting up more and more tall buildings, and to get some real planners, with real vision and understanding of what waterfront sites could actually be like, and give them the job.

Brian Simpson

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