A council in Sydney’s multicultural western suburbs will subsidise personal shopping carts in a desperate effort to stop the third world habit of trolley dumping blighting streets and causing safety issues.
Liverpool City Council, where Australians have been largely replaced by immigrants, started putting abandoned trolleys through a scrap metal shredder in February, and Mayor Ned Mannoun called for tougher state laws to deal with the “menace” of thousands of shopping carts dumped every day.
The council was previously spending $800,000 on landfill every year to deal with the problem.
The move came after neighbouring Canterbury-Bankstown Council, which has even fewer residents of Australian ancestry than Liverpool, began trialling an AI-powered dumped shopping trolley detection system which immediately started picking up about 40 abandoned carts a day.
Liverpool Deputy Mayor Peter Harle said on Monday the council was now working on a plan to help provide residents with two-wheeled shopping carts nicknamed “granny trolleys”, with a focus on the elderly and those without private transport.
“While the law places responsibility for trolleys fair and square at the supermarkets, Council is left with the problem and so Council has come up with a solution,” he said.
“In some ways it’s an old-fashioned solution to a modern problem. Years ago, every home had its own shopping trolley and by going ‘back to the future’ we can probably find a common sense solution to a massive problem.”
Mayor Mannoun said the trial was an innovative solution to a massive state-wide problem, saying: “If personal trolleys for residents cuts the number of dumped trolleys, then everyone wins.”
In the last two months, Liverpool City Council has impounded nearly 1,200 trolleys, most of which have been collected by their supermarket owners, who were charged $46.30 a trolley.
Council is planning another trolley blitz in May and this time will be levying fines of up to $1,320 a trolley.
The council plans to use funds available from its Environmental Levy for the granny trolley scheme, as dumped carts often end up in rivers, canals and drains, and become home to vermin, pests and insects.
“Abandoned trolleys contribute to unsightly and neglected urban spaces, and act as a magnet for more waste and illegal dumping, creating unsightly rubbish dumps and making neighbourhoods appear unsafe and neglected,” the council said.
“Dumped shopping trolleys present a significant safety hazard in public spaces.”
In 2023 NSW residents used the Snap Send Solve reporting system to make 37,764 complaints about abandoned trolleys, and 8,000 were reported in the first six weeks of this year.
At the time of 2021 Census the suburb of Liverpool was just 33.9% Australian born, with 9.4% of residents reporting Australian ancestry. 16.4% of the population was Muslim, making Islam the largest religious group, and 75.6% had both parents born overseas.
Bankstown was 36.1% Australian-born, 8.6% of residents said they had Australian ancestry, 79.7% had both parents born overseas, 31.1% of the population was Muslim, and the largest ancestry groups were Vietnamese (18.7%), Lebanese (11.9%) and Chinese (10.8%).
Header image: Left, abandoned trolleys (Liverpool Cit Council). Right, AI trolley detection software at work (Canterbury-Bankstown Council).
