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A little more than three years ago, residents living in the The Bauhaus apartment block in Pyrmont were discarding kilograms of clothing with their weekly garbage collection.
When Gordon Streight, chairman of the building's strata committee, inspected the building's waste disposal, he was shocked to discover each of 15 industrial-sized bins, servicing 132 apartments, contained bags of clothing often with the purchase tags still attached.
"The number of items of clothing still in their original wrapping staggered me. I thought, 'this is shocking, we're throwing out so much clothing,'" he said.
Since then The Bauhaus has established its own recycling depot, featuring a charity clothes bin, and separate recycling bins for lightbulbs, electronic waste, and batteries.
The apartment block is now regarded by the City of Sydney as a beacon of the inner city's potential to become the greenest city in Australia.
But whereas The Bauhaus residents are currently self-funding their recycling efforts, the council wants such initiatives to become part of its weekly service delivery to 200,000 residents across the local government area.
The proposal is part of the city's new waste strategy, which will be debated by council on Monday, and includes the installation of textile recycling bins in every apartment block, in a bid to tackle the problem of cheap, low-quality fast-fashion which has resulted in clothing comprising six per cent of all garbage waste.
Lord mayor Clover Moore said the strategy aimed to have the city recycling 90 per cent of its waste by 2030, where "not a single item collected by city waste services ends up in landfill."
According to council figures, residents currently generated close to 65,000 tonnes of waste per year or 313 kilograms per person per year.
Cr Moore said three quarters of the city's population lived in apartment buildings, creating "an opportunity to collect thousands of tonnes of textiles that can be recycled and used to create new products."
However, the challenge for many apartment buildings remains one of limited space, making it difficult to find room for waste and recycling facilities, and potentially contributing to the problem of illegal dumping of unwanted items.
Mr Streight said The Bauhaus overcame this problem by installing its recycling depot in the building's underground carpark, using a spare car park which was purchased from one of the residents.
He said the overall to cost to residents of running the recycling scheme had been "nominal", and the uptake had been huge.
"Sometimes between collections the [clothing] bin is so full the bin is overflowing," he said.
Under the council's strategy, households will also be able to book free weekly kerbside electronic waste collections, allowing the recovery of metals such as aluminium and copper from items such as computers and fridges.
This would expand the council's existing e-waste collection service, which is held every three months as a drop-off service at designated collection points across the city, often limiting access to residents with a car. A dedicated drop-off centre would also established for problem items such as chemicals, paints, batteries and gas bottles, which cannot be left on the kerb.
The strategy also proposed developing a subsidised trial of residential food waste collection, which would invite residents to "opt-in" to have their organic waste collected alongside their weekly kerbside collection.
A spokesman for the City of Sydney said the council hoped the initiatives would be implemented by 2019, and said the finer details of the strategy would be developed after it had been endorsed by council, and public feedback had been sought.
