Circular Economy Councils Fund – Round 3: Information bulletin

Visual summary

This video shows a Powerpoint presentation conveying information about the Circular Economy Councils Fund Round 3. This presentation is accompanied by a video of the person speaking.

Chair:

Luke Wilkinson - Manager, Regions and Partnerships

The 5 key speakers are:

• Linda Duffy - Project Lead, Circular Economy Councils Fund
• Kate Shaw - Project Officer, Circular Economy Councils Fund
• April Williams- Circular Economy Champion, Monash City Council
• Merav Goldberg - Sustainability and Wastes Project Officer, Glen Eira City Council
• La Vergne Lehmann - Waste and Sustainability Coordinator, Yarriambiack Shire Council

[Opening visual of slide with text saying ‘Information Session:’, ‘Circular Economy Councils Fund’, ‘Round 2’, ‘February 2023’, ‘Sustainability Victoria’]

[The visuals during this webinar are of each speaker presenting in turn via video, with reference to the content of a PowerPoint presentation being played on screen]

Luke Wilkinson:

Welcome to our Information Session on the Circular Economy Councils Fund Round 3. I’m going to be doing a quick little introduction and then I’ll hand over to my colleagues Linda Duffy who’s the Program Manager for the Circular Economy Councils Fund and also Kate Shaw who’s a Project Officer on this program, Circular Economy Councils Fund.

Let’s start by acknowledging acknowledgment of country. Kate. And really want to pay our respects and acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands that we’re meeting on today. I’m talking to you from Boon Wurrung Bunurong lands down in southern Gippsland and we want to pay our respects to the Elders past, present and emerging of the lands that you are all on joining in this discussion today.

The artwork you can see there is produced by very talented Gooditjmara, Yorta Yorta and Wemba Wemba man Thomas Day and this artwork was commissioned by the Victorian State Government. And we often use this in our acknowledgement of country as recognising the values that we hold and also acknowledging the traditional owners that we’re all meeting on today.

Next slide please Kate.

So today I’m going to quickly go over a background of the Circular Economy Councils Fund then we’ll move into a bit of an overview of the program. We’ll go through eligibility, due diligence, the assessment process, key dates and hopefully have some time to answer some questions that we’d like you to pose. So next slide please Kate. Housekeeping.

Just a reminder that this is recorded and we’re going to post the recording of this session on the website, SV website, and also the Round 3 Guidelines. We don’t have a chat function but we have a Q&A function live. You’ll see that on the top of your ribbon there. We’d encourage you to pose questions as they come up to you as we go through the content. We are going to work to provide an answer but we may need to go back and check with our grants team on some of the questions before we post an answer. But we will commit to you to provide an answer to all the questions posed and have that in the mailout that you’ll all get towards the end of this week.

We also want to flag that you can use the Q&A function if you are a council seeking partnership with other councils in a project proposal. Please put forward the project idea or proposal that you’ve got and you’re looking to collaborate with other councils on. You can put your email in that Q&A box and then other councils will be able to see that and who the contact person is and then after the session we can copy and paste those details and circulate them to join the dots. Next slide please Kate.

So, a bit of background on the Circular Economy Councils Fund. This particular program is part of the Recycling Victoria $380 million ten-year circular economy policy. It contains a whole lot of programs and initiatives that the State Government has committed and resourced to. The Circular Economy Councils fund is one and it’s very much under goal two of the policy which is about promoting better use and products for more value. Next slide please Kate.

So what we’re talking about when we’re referring to circular economy. Easy way to start is talk about the opposite to the circular economy which is the traditional linear economy which is all about take, make and dispose. This traditional method of production is about maximising the use of raw materials, transforming them, making them into products and eventually disposing them as unusable material. Linear economy is all about exhausting raw materials and energy which results in greenhouse gas emissions leading to climate change.

The alternative to that is the circular economy which is about maintaining the added value of material and about eliminating or aiming to eliminate waste as best as possible. It’s concentrated on the use of products as resources with big emphasis on design, use, reuse, recycling and reduction of waste as you’ll see. Next slide please Kate.

So this fund that we’re talking about today and this Round 3 is all about supporting local councils to transition to the circular economy through avoiding waste going to landfill, refurbishing and resale of goods and products instead of going to landfill, recycling materials, remanufacturing those materials into other products and reusing materials in other applications.

Now the reasons that we see for councils to apply is the circular economy is very much about boosting local economic activity and employment. Councils very much play a role in leading their community in terms of the behaviours and the practices and transitioning their community to a circular economy. It’s also a great opportunity for councils to get resources and support to address local opportunities but also collaborate with other councils on those opportunities. Also the reasons to apply is about focusing on local solutions and relevant priority or materials to your local community. And the final reason is this is the last round of the Circular Economy Councils Fund so great reason to apply. Next slide please Kate.

And I will hand over to Linda Duffy our Program Lead for the Circular Economy Councils Fund to take us through the overview. Thanks.

Linda Duffy:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Circular Economy Councils Fund’, ‘Fund overview’, ‘Sustainability Victoria’]

Great. Thanks Luke. Thanks Kate. Thanks for coming along everybody. Great to have you. I’m joining from Yorta Yorta lands up near the River Murray.

So today just to run through the overarching objectives of the fund. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to have a look at the guidelines. We’ll send the links out again following the session today but basically the overarching objectives of this fund have not changed. So that’s your project needs to meet one or more of these three overarching pillars. And that’s decrease the amount of waste going to landfill, increase the material that’s reused, repaired, repurposed or recycled and increase local circular economy activity. So that’s resulting in jobs and local businesses. The projects need to occur in Victoria and they need to be of benefit to Victoria. So next slide Kate.

So the funding available this time around for Round 3. The parameters are $30,000 to $500,000 maximum. So $30,000 is the minimum and that can be for individual councils, for the Alpine Resorts or partnerships of councils. So within that envelope of $30,000 to $500,000 we’re not mandating what that mix might be. That’s up to you to decide what your project is and the amount that you apply for.

So next slide Kate please.

And so for this funding round we’ve significantly changed the co-contribution. So we’ve responded to feedback from councils. So you guys have told us that was a limiting factor so this time for every $5 of grant money from SV the co-contribution from councils needs to be $1 for every $5. So of that up to 50% of that can be in-kind. So we need at least 50% of your co‑contribution to be in cash. So you can see the example there. If your application is for $200,000, the co-contribution needs to be $40,000, and of that at least $20,000 must be in cash. And you can see the relevant section of the guidelines there is 1.2. So next slide please Kate.

Okay. So just wanted to give you a flavour of some of the projects that have been funded successfully in the previous funding rounds and how they went about it. So for Swan Hill they completed a feasibility study in Round 1 and based on that feasibility study work that they did they were successful getting $167,500 in Round 2 as an implementation project for their mattress recycling facility. Bayside, similarly they also did a feasibility in Round 1 to look at how to go about doing their reuse and repair centre or service for their community. So from that Round 1 grant they were successful for $50,000 under Round 2. So interestingly for those thinking about that reuse tip shop style of project the feasibility study for those guys, for Bayside, the recommendation wasn’t for a physical site so they’ve decided to do popup events that are themed across the year.

And then on the next slide we’ve got Yarriambiack. So they had a different basis for their successful grant for Round 1. They used work that had been done in Western Australia. So for those guys $175,000 they received in Round 1 to fund kit, so to actually get the equipment to do their glass crushing operation. And that’s a partnership of the five councils in the Wimmera‑Mallee. We’ll hear from La Vergne later on today about how that experience has been for them. And Strathbogie it was just $10,000 they received in Round 1 to do a feasibility study and they were looking for their reuse/resale shop where to locate it and what they needed to interrogate in terms of access and how to best serve the residents. So they were successful in Round 2 for $71,000 for their Nagambie Resource Recovery Centre. So that’s underway at the moment.

And then on the next slide we’ve got again a different way of doing it. The City of Wyndham, they had already done an internal business case study on setting up a bulk materials centre at Werribee so they were successful in Round 1 gaining $250,000 for that project. So I guess what we’re saying is there’s all manner of ways to do it. We’d encourage you to look at the 53 projects that have been funded so far under this program. We’ll pop the link for that where they are on the SV website and basically to navigate there as we’ve got, SV website, and then you’re navigating through to the funded projects for Circular Economy Councils Fund.

So on the next slide we just wanted to point out the changes, so the major changes from previous rounds to this round. So this time around there’s only one funding stream. It’s not divided into feasibility and implementation. There’s just one stream. As I’ve outlined the co‑contribution has been eased. So that’s $1 from council for every $5 from SV. Councils can make multiple applications. So we haven’t set any limits on application numbers but all of the applications will be assessed on their merit. It’s a competitive process. And if the fund is over‑subscribed then SV will apply a diversity lens. So that means as Kate will talk about later looking at the mix of materials or the mix of geography or council types.

As in previous rounds these applications can include project management costs. So if you have staff that will be 100% dedicated to the project that’s an eligible cost to include in your application. So that could be you might have a council staffer who does two days a week now and for an extra one day a week they will manage the project that you’re thinking about. That extra day a week is an eligible cost to put in your application. So what we’re looking for, we’re really mindful and you will be too that we’re looking for projects that will complete by June ’24. So SV needs to see a really solid rationale, so the basis for your project, what it is and how you’re going to adapt it. So that basis can be as other previous projects have done, so previous feasibility study, business case work that your council or another council somewhere else not necessarily in Victoria has done, projects that have been funded already, the 53 that are outlined on SV’s website, or work you guys at council have done already. So something that you’ve got ready to go and you’ve got a really good basis for it.

What the assessors will need to see is evidence of that rationale and how you’ve adapted it to your proposal. So if it’s from another council to do a particular project to demonstrate that you’ve really thought through how you will adapt that piece of work for your council. So we’d really encourage you connect with the other councils and we’ll help as much as we can with that. And look at that list of the previously funded projects.

So I think that’s from me. I’m going to hand over to Kate now who will talk us through the eligibility.

Kate Shaw:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Eligibility’]

Wonderful. Thanks so much Linda. As Linda’s mentioned we really need a Victorian council to be the lead applicant although it can be a collaborative project with other councils or local NGOs or businesses to you. And we’re focusing on projects that support the aims of the fund, all about decreasing waste to landfill, increasing the materials reused, and promoting CE within communities, hoping to increase employment and local economic activity. And also eligible are any materials apart from waste to energy. And as Linda has mentioned we’re wanting evidence from a feasibility study. That doesn’t necessarily have to be yours but wanting to see that you might have adapted it to your particular council context. And the projects have to be completed by 30^th of June. And you’ll notice we’ve got a bit of a focus on the reuse and resale shops in response to your feedback that lots of councils are looking to implement those at the moment. So we’ll hear more about our info session on that from Linda shortly.

Looking at what won’t be able to be funded in this round. Some of the usual suspects. Projects that are sort of primarily focused on complying with a regulatory order or that don’t meet planning requirements. We’re also not able to fund projects that are being funded already by another source outside of your council. And I mentioned waste to energy projects can’t be funded and also any retrospective funding where you might have already started a project.

Looking at due diligence, also things you will be pretty accustomed to. Noting any workplace breaches need to be declared and they’ll be assessed by SV. You need to have adequate insurances in place as councils and provide them to us as well down the track and declare and manage any conflicts of interest. And you need to have sufficiently progressed or completed projects previously funded by SV. But any questions on these don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Grants Enquiries via email that we’ll pop up on the screen later on and is also on our guidelines page. Don’t feel like – if you have questions on things that you feel might preclude you from applying definitely reach out and confirm that. Confirm these things first.

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Application and Assessment Process’]

Looking at the application and assessment process. This is also in SmartyGrants. So just double checking it’s eligible. Be in touch if you have questions. The funding agreements and terms of participation are also in our guidelines. There’s links there so you don’t need to hunt them out too hard. But good to be across them and create an account to start your application in SmartyGrants. And there’s also support for you if you get stuck on any of those parts with SmartyGrants. We recommend saving regularly because it can sort of kick you off after a period of inaction. So just make sure you’re regularly saving. And we’ve got a couple of funds open at the moment so just double check you’re in the council’s fund Round 3. That one is the right one. And upload the supporting evidence that we’ve been talking about. The more the better, any supporting material you have, and make sure you’ve got it in by the due date, the Friday the 31^st of March. Yeah. Be in touch if you have any questions or worries on those things.

And finally from me looking at how it will be assessed. So as Linda mentioned it’s a competitive, merit‑based process and all of these criteria are on the SmartyGrants form as well so you don’t need to memorise these. But just good to think about as you’re preparing your application. The assessment panel will be looking at what the project is and wanting to see how it contributes to the outcomes of the fund and what the fund’s wanting to deliver through these projects. We want to hear about why is it essential that the project is funded and what’s the value that it sort of delivers. The assessment panel will want to see who will deliver it, do you have staff resources, describe these people in your application. And as Linda noted before program delivery and staff costs that are related to the project can be included in the grant amount which is wonderful.

And finally the assessment panel want to hear how it’s going to be delivered by that due date noting that June ’24. So if possible to share your project plan on that. And finally on the assessment process as Linda mentioned as well there’s another overlay of criteria that could be engaged by the assessment panel, looking at regional and metro applications, council sizes, the types of CE projects and materials and really wanting to ensure that we achieve a mix of projects across. So I’m going to hand back to Linda now to share info about our next session and I’ll pop you back on the screen. Thanks so much everyone.

Linda Duffy:

Great. Thanks Kate. Okay. So from feedback from councils people have identified that they’re really keen as a first step the resale shop would be a good theme for them to pursue for their communities. So to that end we’re having a separate session next Wednesday, 8^th of March at 11:00 to have some councils to present about how that experience has been for them. So we’ll have a mix of councils talking about the different phases that they are at in terms of setting up a resale shop. So some of them will be talking about what they’ve found from the feasibility project rational that they’ve been trying to interrogate for them, how that has panned out. And sometimes the outcomes and the recommendation like Bayside’s might not be what was originally envisaged.

And then we’ve got a couple talking about the implementation of it and for them what those difficult issues might have been in terms of accessibility across a large shire, where do you actually site the first store or next resale shop. And then also talking about what sort of models. So is it a social enterprise that council has partnered with to run it, what lessons they’ve learned, what the barriers have been and the benefits for the community, which certainly in the feedback from you it was the social and community benefits was a big driver for people being interested in setting up resale shops. So that’s next Wednesday the 8^th.

So in terms of key dates, so this session today. The fund is open at the moment. We’ve got the resale shop session next Wednesday. The round will close 31^st of March. So as Kate has said that’s via your SmartyGrants login. So we encourage people to start early and make sure your login’s working and get any pieces of info going that you can. We’re hoping to be able to announce successful projects by July. We are dependent on the Minister’s Office. So it’s the Minister who announces the successful. So our scheduling is that if we can get announced by July then we can start contracting in July. And for us it’s really important to try and give you as much time as possible to complete those projects by June ’24. So we’re aiming to give you 12 months as much as we can.

So now we’re just going to hear from some projects that have been running and get their take on how they’ve found the process and just some tips and tricks on what has worked, what the barriers might have been and what the successes have been. So firstly we’re going to hear from April and Merav. So April is the Circular Economy Champion at Monash City Council and April led the 13 council partnership on the best practice reusable nappies feasibility study. And that has led to Merav working on and leading the 14 council partnership of the implementation of the recommendations of that project. So I’ll hand over firstly to April and hear from April and Merav of how they’ve found that experience.

Okay. So we’re getting there. I think April your mic might be muted. There we go. Awesome. We’ve got you now. Thank you. Sorry guys.

April Williams:

Here I was talking away. Hi everyone. April here from Monash Council. So just briefly today I’ll talk about some of the project achievements from our – it was actually a 12 council collaborative project – and given that we only have 12 months for the next project I guess some of the learnings we had from such a big collaborative team project.

So we did the reusable nappy feasibility study. The 12 councils are just on the screen there with their logos. I think that probably the biggest standout for the project to succeed was that the 12 councils already had a really great existing relationship and that was through forums like Ednet through the Metro Waste, the WRRG, and also the Yammer Group. So we already knew each other quite well and were able to work together really, really well.

We did achieve some great outcomes from the project in terms of getting some really great independent research which wasn’t publicly already available from other projects, benchmarking of other existing projects and our social research achieved much greater feedback from the community than we anticipated. We were hoping to get 50 responses per council and we got over 2,000 for the 12 councils. So we were really pleased with that. And we got some strong recommendations that we could then put into our next grant.

So if we could go to the next slide thank you. So I think the real keys to success were we spent a fair bit of time developing and getting agreement on our governance model. Very fortunately we didn’t have to go back to that at any point in the project but we tried to think about all the things that could go wrong, get an agreement, put it in writing, and I think we always had that in the background to come back to. We didn’t need it but I think investing some time in getting that right is important. Our project plan was developed early on and we built buffers into the timeline which I know isn’t always possible with short timeframes but something to consider.

We took a lot of time to get the specifications right before we went to tender and we got a lot of feedback from all the participating councils on that. And so I feel like we got a good outcome. I will say as well we approached I think ten consultants and we only got two quotes back at the time. So potentially go wider than you think in case a lot of consultants are busy if that’s what you’re doing with your project.

In terms of getting feedback from 12 councils it’s quite tricky. We always committed to getting input from everyone but we did keep the project moving forward. So we gave opportunity for people to input but we didn’t wait for every decision to have input from everyone on board. I think you just have to do that with so many people involved. And then we did create some very small working groups for specific topics like to review the procurement side of things and then when it came to the final report we needed some really good eyes on that to get it to the shape that we were happy to publish it.

But I guess again the biggest takeaway for me was having those existing relationships. I wouldn’t be applying for a grant to deliver in 12 months if your partners either internally or externally you don’t know or it might be a hard relationship. I think you’ve got to draw on your allies and your relationships first. So they would be my takeaways. I’ll hand over to Merav.

Merav Goldberg:

Hi everyone. I’m not sure if you can hear me. Yep. Hi. So Merav here from Glen Eira and I will just echo what April said. We’re in the process of I guess implementing the best practice reusable nappy program and we’re probably a third way in, maybe less. So there’s more to go but my learnings so far have been very much like April. And because this is a 14 councils collaboration having those strong relationships with the other councils is really beneficial.

Keeping in mind, depending on the topic that you end up working on, but ours in particular was a bit of a high profile, nappies being a component in the garbage bin and with councils who were moving to a fortnightly collection that is an item of interest. So that really draws attention so be mindful of media and take the time to address that element if it’s relevant to you.

But I guess the only other thing I’ll add in terms of what is helpful to managing that and keeping in the timeline is also utilising any document sharing platforms if you can, if your council allows. I find that it helps to be able to share documents instead of emailing back and forth different versions. Just version control, good collaboration, everyone contributes in real time and it’s been a real help progressing the project and trying to keep that in the timeframe. And let’s see how we go in a few months.

Linda Duffy:

Excellent. Thank you Merav. Yes. I think that as you say the communication between all the partners is key and I’m sure La Vergne is going to talk more to that. She’s going to tell us a little bit now about the Wommera-Mallee glass crushing project. So over to you La Vergne.

La Vergne Lehmann:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Yarriambiack Shire Council’, ‘Glass Crusher Project’]

Thank you. Yes. I would certainly reiterate making sure you have really good communication and understanding the needs of your partnering councils. We did it with five councils and one of the things that we certainly experienced along the way was almost all five councils had changes in staff during that time. So we had a number of new people who were coming on partway through. And the other thing is understanding I guess the sign off requirements for each council. So we developed a memorandum of understanding. In hindsight we probably should have worked on that much earlier than what we did because some councils have I guess different degrees of delegation as to who can actually sign off on those things and some things have to wait for certain meetings to occur and so forth. So yeah understanding the different parameters that each council has for making sure you’ve got a good governance approach to your project is really important particularly when you’ve got shorter timeframes.

Our project was a glass crusher and again we changed the project as we went along. We learnt a lot of different things along the way. We started off with what was going to be a mobile glass crusher. When we started having a look more closely at what we needed we realised that the best outcome would be for it to be in one location. We were in very much a rural area in Western Victoria, five councils that are very large in area, so transporting a glass crusher around and making sure we met all our relevant OH&S requirements was really important.

I guess one of the things I also reiterate about something like a glass crusher – and again this will depend upon your particular project – but glass crushing is not generally considered to be part of core council business. So this was something completely new to us and has meant a lot of learning curves around how we operate it, what’s the best way to operate it and a lot of those sorts of things that perhaps we hadn’t realised right upfront would be some of the issues. But I mean it’s been a really useful experience for all of us but there were some things in there that perhaps we needed to have thought through a little bit more.

And I’ll outline some of those. So things like dust suppression. So one of the issues around crushing glass is that you do have a lot of glass dust, silica dust, and that’s certainly an issue that’s been in the media a lot lately with the silicosis issue. This is not the same issue but nonetheless we had to make sure that we’re looking after our staff. So putting in a misting system. So we’ve got a quote for that now. We’ve also had to look at increasing the size of the hopper for width of loading, the glass material, which we’ve been collecting since July last year. We’ll have two other councils coming on board in April to deliver their glass to us as well so that will significantly increase the volume of glass that we have coming through. So we were fortunate we did have that timeframe that allowed us to bed down the actual glass crusher in terms of operation before we had to take on everybody else’s glass.

So things like having to add another conveyor belt to deal with the end product, ensuring the orientation and location of the crusher. It allowed for optimal operation. So we had it the wrong way round in the first instance. It was put a certain way and it should have been put a different way. All of these things that we’ve had to fix up along the way.

And again I’ll go back to the decision not to have a mobile unit was a good one in the end because it meant that we only had to make sure we had operator training for our staff. If we’d gone with the mobile unit we would have had to have done that for every staff and that would have been significantly more complicated with five other councils. We also had to develop SOPs for safe operation so again because it’s not part of our core business and that’s been probably the biggest learning curve. So if you’re going to have a project that is significantly different from what you already do you need to think all those sorts of things through because you need to make sure your staff are ready for it as well.

I think that’s most of it. But things like the MOU, if you can get that done early, even before you’ve actually got the funding, at least understand what’s required in your MOU, that would be really good. I’ll just finish off here around the glass crusher itself, is making sure you understand what you’re going to be doing with your end product. So again make sure you talk to your engineers and make sure they can use that material and know what you’re going to do with it otherwise you’ve got a product you can’t use. And storage for that as well. So make sure you I guess tick off with your partner councils all along the way all the things that you’re going to be doing from the collection process through to the processing and then the end product.

And I guess the one thing I’d finish off with around the glass crusher – because it sounds like it’s difficult and it has been quite difficult – but we will ultimately have really significant savings because the collection and processing of the glass is about a third of the cost of our mixed recycling because of the transport costs that we have going to Melbourne. So that’s ultimately been the advantage for our councils. Thanks.

Linda Duffy:

Excellent. Thank you La Vergne. So I’m not entirely sure if this is Luke or myself into this section. But I can take it away Luke if you’re happy.

Terrific. Thanks La Vergne. I think that’s a really good example. Yarriambiack have done all the learning so if that’s the sort of project someone’s interested in, that’s the type of thing that you could lean on to do an application. So I think I’d really like to thank April, Merav and La Vergne for sharing how they’ve gone. I think there’s been a massive amount that has been learned along the way from those projects from the previous rounds and we’re just getting to a stage where we’re getting really good outcomes from those.

Okay. So just in summary, so to wrap up. That’s good. We’re running ahead of time. So pretty much just wanted to thank everybody for coming along, thank our presenters and just to do a bit of a wrap around if you’ve got a project idea – we’ve got a couple of questions in the Q&A boxes. But if you’ve got an idea that you’re even only half thinking of pop it in the Q&A chat on the side and your email address so everyone knows how to contact you. Even if it’s a tricky project that’s exactly the sort of thing that we’re after. So this funding round is to tease out the things that are of difficulty to council and give an opportunity for you to do something about them.

So after today we’ll share this PowerPoint slide deck and any of those joint project ideas that have come either through this channel in the Q&A or the Grants Enquiries email. We’ll pull together some FAQs and get those lists of the funded projects out to you. And from there just the reminders about the things that are coming up. As Kate and Luke and I have said, so we’ve got the session next Wednesday for the tip shop theme. Get into that application early. Make sure your SmartyGrants is working. And I think you guys would know for probity we can’t help with your project but we’re really aware of the gap that has been left by our colleagues that were the Waste Resource Recovery Groups. So that work those guys did in linking you together we also know from feedback that’s a gap. So wherever we can we will link you with other councils, send you whatever information that we can, but we can’t help with your project itself.

So that’s our part for Councils Fund. So just to let you know as Kate said earlier there’s a couple of other grants that are available at the moment. So the Buy Recycled Champions have got an expression of interest that’s out at the moment. It’s closing at the end of this week. We can send you the link for the online form for that. And the Circular Economy Household Education Fund is also open at the moment for councils and that closes 17^th of March.

So from there I might hand over to you Luke if you wanted to just talk through those couple of questions we’ve got or any other questions people may have. Thanks.

Luke Wilkinson:

Thanks Linda. Yeah. I suppose we had two good questions. There’s another one there. But two good questions. One initially was around often we see community organisations that might be looking at proposals. Natasha actually gave a good question about a Men’s Shed wanting to do a project. In essence this round is for councils to apply. So a community group would not be eligible to apply for funding under this grant. However a council could apply to get some funding to do a project in partnership with a local community group. So there’s potential there. That said there’s also a separate communities fund that has been running that has supported a number of projects. So we’ll provide a bit further information on that particular fund. But I suppose the door is still open for proposals that are applied for by councils that can in effect partner with a local community organisation, NGO to run a sort of initiative in the local municipality.

There was also a good question from Michael around a proposal that may not have a feasibility study done or a business case done already. And we’re very aware of that. I suppose because it’s the last round of this fund we’re very much about supporting projects that are going to be implementing initiatives on the ground. But as Linda said there may not be time to do a standalone business case or feasibility study for your proposal Michael but we are more than happy to try and connect the dots between what you might be proposing and another initiative that may have been done in another council and then apply what has been learnt and proposed in that other council to your situation and proposal. So yeah putting forward that idea in the Grants Enquiries email or in the Q&A chat now is strongly encouraged.

So Kate put a comment in there about if anyone’s interested in council reuse tip shops we’ve supported a number of these type of initiatives in earlier rounds so more than happy to play that connecting dots with other councils. So Mansfield and Mount Alex councils are interested in learning more there. So great. Keep them coming.

I think that’s about it Linda from questions. Sorry. There’s one there from Steve that snuck in quickly.

Nice one. So there’s some timber material there suggested from Steve. So that’s a good one. We can take that – I’m just trying to think.

I think Steve what we might do is go back and have a look at that question you’ve got around a potential proposal and provide you some written advice in the chat, in the document that goes out at the end of this week. But thanks for the question.

Linda Duffy:

Yeah. Agreed. I think that’s one that we might pop through our Grants Enquiries, make sure we’ve got a good answer for you Steve.

Luke Wilkinson:

And likewise another good question from Alena east of me in East Gippsland around an idea proposal there around education. Again we’ll just need to look at that Alena because it does sort of fit in community engagement and education space so we’ll just need to understand that. I take your point about using recycled materials but we’ll provide a written response to that by the end of the week.

Linda Duffy:

That sounds good. And I guess on that, that’s the value of looking back at the projects that have been funded under this program already because we’ve got a couple of projects that have done the circular economy hub idea. So we can link you with those guys and that might help with the basis for your application.

Excellent. I’m just wondering if we leave the Q&A open. So perhaps we’re good to wrap up this formal presentation part but if we leave the Q&A boxes open so that people can keep adding and putting their project ideas in and then we might close that out at our 11:30 end time if that sounds like a good plan.

Great. Okay. So I think from there big thank you to everybody for joining. Really hoping that we get some great applications in. We’re looking forward to seeing them. We know you’re all busy. We know that councils have got a lot of impost on their time with kerbside reform and impacts of COVID and other things so we value your work and we really want to help you make it continue and be better. So thank you. Looking forward to those applications coming and thank you for your time today. That’s it from me. Thank you.

Kate Shaw:

There’s another question that’s popped on there about potential project assisting local businesses to be more CE focused. And I know we’ve had projects similar to that in the past. Luke would you say that’s eligible for this implementation round?

Linda Duffy:

Yes. Definitely Kate. So again we’ve had a couple of projects that have worked on circular economy precincts for small/medium enterprises. So yeah we’ll pop the links for those across to you.

Kate Shaw:

Wonderful. There’s not too many people left on the call anymore but leaving it open if you wanted to add your question still. But we’ll finish up. Thanks everyone.

Linda Duffy:

Okay. Cheers.

[Closing visual of slide with text saying ‘Thank you’, ‘It’s up to all of us to help shape the State of the Future’, ‘f @SustainVic’, ‘T @SustainVic’, ‘in Sustainability Victoria’, ‘Sustainability Victoria’, ‘Victoria State Government’]

[End of Transcript]