Every household in Victoria puts out two, three or four bins. Together they add up to 2.35 million tonnes a year, and a little over half of it never reaches landfill. Which half depends on something most people never think about: how many bins their council hands out.
Victoria is moving every council onto a four-bin system. Not every council is there yet, and the gap between those that are and those that are not turns out to explain more about recycling performance than anything else on this page.
Everything that goes to landfill. Collected weekly almost everywhere.
1,108,000 tonnes a yearGarden clippings, and in most councils food scraps too. Known as FOGO, short for food organics and garden organics.
718,000 tonnes a yearPaper, plastics and metals, sorted at a materials recovery facility, or MRF.
503,000 tonnes a yearGlass kept separate so it does not shatter and contaminate the yellow bin. Only 16 councils had one in 2023–24.
16,000 tonnes a yearCouncils publish their waste figures, but only one council at a time and in spreadsheets nobody reads. Put side by side, they show a gap in service that residents have no easy way to see.
Any Victorian who puts a bin out. No statistical background assumed, and every term defined where it first appears.
Five government datasets: 23 years of kerbside tonnages and five years of service costs for all 79 councils, plus council boundaries, 664 waste facilities and the 2021 census socio-economic indexes. All listed at the foot of the page.
Diversion is the share of kerbside material kept out of landfill. It is the single number councils are judged on, and it anchors most of what follows. Maps carry anything geographic, because the pattern here is about where you live.
Most people picture recycling as the yellow bin. By weight it is the smallest of the three that matter. Food and garden waste overtook it years ago.
Each square is one per cent of Victoria's kerbside collection, 2023–24.
31% of everything collected at the kerb is now food and garden waste, against 21 per cent in the yellow recycling bin.
Nearly half still goes straight to landfill. Shrinking that red block is what every policy on this page is trying to do.
Share of each council type's total kerbside tonnage, by stream, 2023–24.
Regional cities put the largest share through the green bin. Small shires put the most into landfill.
That is the first hint that the useful split is not city against country, but large councils against small ones.
Kilograms of kerbside material per household per year, 2023–24. Measured per household rather than per person, because bins are issued to properties.
Volume is not the same as performance. Some of the heaviest councils are also among the best at keeping it out of landfill.
Holiday and peri-urban councils sit high: larger blocks mean more garden waste, and visitor populations are not counted in the household figure.
Councils report how much of what they collect avoids landfill. The median council manages about half. The spread behind that median runs from 16 per cent to 74.
Share of kerbside material kept out of landfill. Metropolitan Melbourne is shown separately because its councils are too small to read at state scale.
One dot per council. The bar marks each type's median, 2024–25. Regional cities, not metropolitan councils, have the highest median in the state at 55 per cent; small shires are lowest at 41. Every group overlaps nearly every other, so knowing a council's category tells you very little about how it performs.
Share of kerbside recycling collected but never recovered, statewide.
18.7% of what goes in the yellow bin never becomes anything, up from 5.3 per cent in 2015–16.
The jump starts in 2017–18, when China stopped accepting the world's imported recycling and Victoria's processing market fell apart.
Metropolitan councils keep 50.2 per cent out of landfill. Regional councils keep 50.5. They spend $138 and $141 a bin. The comparison everyone reaches for first is a rounding error.
What separates a good council from a poor one is far more ordinary: how many bins it gives you.
Councils with a food and garden bin keep about half their waste out of landfill. Councils without one manage barely a third. Nothing else in this data comes close to that effect.
Each curve shows how councils with that service are spread across the diversion range, 2024–25.
The red curve is the ten councils still on two bins. Its peak sits around 31 per cent.
Add a green bin and the whole distribution shifts right, to a median of 52. Adding a fourth bin for glass barely moves it again — the gain is almost entirely in that third bin.
Councils without a kerbside food and garden collection, 2023–24.
Twelve of the thirteen are rural shires in the state's west and east, where long distances to a processing facility make a green bin expensive to run. Yarra is the thirteenth — an inner-Melbourne council four kilometres from the CBD, where the obstacle is not distance but apartments with nowhere to put a third bin.
Recycling is usually assumed to be the expensive option. Across Victoria's councils the relationship runs the other way, and reasonably strongly.
Grey dots are all 79 councils in 2024–25. Dashed lines mark the state medians. Coloured paths trace four councils across five years.
Most councils sit in the green or the plain quadrants. Very few manage to spend a lot and still bury most of it.
Knox and Greater Bendigo moved up and to the left: better results, lower cost. Casey and Yarra went the other way.
A likely reason is the landfill levy. A tonne in the green bin avoids a charge that has been rising steeply, so diverting waste is now often the cheaper option.
A Dorling cartogram. Every council is a circle sized by the waste it collects and nudged off its real location only as far as needed to stop circles overlapping, so the 22 small metropolitan councils carry the same visual weight as the vast rural shires. The filled part of each circle is the share kept out of landfill: a thin ring means most of it is buried. Colour is the cost of a garbage bin.
If performance tracks advantage, the obvious worry is that poorer areas are being left without services. The data supports the first half of that and not the second.
Two measures on one map. Across: the ABS index of disadvantage, where 1000 is the national average. Down: the share kept out of landfill. The darkest blue-green councils score high on both.
How councils with and without a food and garden bin are spread across the socio-economic scale.
The two curves sit almost exactly on top of each other. Median 982 for councils with a green bin, 968 for those without.
So service access tracks council size and distance, not wealth. Worth stating plainly, because it is the opposite of what the first map might suggest.
A caution. Metropolitan councils score highest on advantage but only middling on diversion, while regional cities score lower and divert most. The relationship is real but tangled up with council type.
The green bin did not arrive all at once. It spread council by council over a decade, while the recycling system it sat alongside took the worst hit in its history.
Tonnes collected across Victoria each year. Band thickness is tonnage.
Drag the slider to move through the years. Only 27 councils gained a green bin they did not have before. The bigger shift was garden-only bins starting to accept food scraps as well: 3 councils in 2015–16, 55 by 2023–24. The band chart underneath shows all nine years at once, with a line marking the year on the map.
Victoria's recycling story is usually told as a contest between the city and the bush. The numbers do not support that. What they show instead is a service gap: thirteen councils, most of them small and remote, still running the two-bin system the rest of the state left behind — and diverting barely a third of their waste as a result.
The state has set 2030 as the deadline for four bins everywhere. On the rollout's current pace, that is the single change that would move these numbers most.