In the past 3 months, I have hit the road and the air! I’ve been to Emerald and Moranbah in QLD, off to SA to visit 4 facilities, out to the Southern Downs Region and soon to Moreton Bay.  We’ve been to Lockyer out on site at Gatton, to a conference in Yeppoon, a quick trip to FNQ and only a few weeks ago I was outside of not-so-sunny Sydney, dealing with the cold in Moss Vale and Bowral.

Someone asked me recently on one of those trips, why we couldn’t just have one suite of approaches; whether it related to our transactional software, the way that we manage our finance or admin process, or the way that we manage our tip face. Because, don’t we all do things the same way?

And they couldn’t be more right. I think there is a significant opportunity for us to leverage learnings from each other and build capacity within our teams without constantly reinventing the wheel!!

Facilities in Upper Hunter NSW, as an example, have some real similarities to a council on the other side of Sydney, in Shoalhaven. They are using a regulatory structure with EPA NSW to manage the way their tip shop waste is recorded – but that same process is also being used effectively by a council in Far North QLD. I’ve seen similar functions in WA, and I’m about to travel to SA where I am implementing a data model that was created for an organisation that has facilities across the entire country and is standardising their approach to data capture nation-wide.

So, yes! We can do things using standards, we just have to find a time to come together, define what those standards are, accept that most of us do things in the same or a similar way, and that there might be those few specific scenarios that relate to a distinct site or region.

The way that our staff learn, the types of people that we employ at our facilities, and the skills we want them to have in terms of customer service or resource recovery industry experience… Whether you’re working for a Social Enterprise in the southernmost tip of Victoria or working for Local Government in the tip of Queensland … they all have the same challenges – and the same solutions.

I really enjoyed a recent chat with the Deputy Director General of Queensland’s Department of Environment this month, to talk about Capacity Building and how we can, as a group of facilities, a group of local governments and a group of operators in an industry, leverage those learnings so that everyone isn’t reinvesting in building that wheel!

It’s wonderful to see such an interest from a state department in helping to support facilities, both local government and commercial, to have shared experiences and shared learnings…. and I only hope that the conversation is one that can also then expand to other states across the country.