There are a lot of things I like about living in the outer suburbs of Sydney.

For example: Just last week I picked up my daughter from school, took a 5-minute detour from our usual commute home through the local Botanic Gardens and ended up watching about a dozen kangaroos hopping across a field.

But this post isn’t about the Gardens, (though I’m sure I’ll write about that soon).

Instead, it’s about recycling. In particular, the fact that our local council has been working with a group called Recycle Smart, which has changed the way we try to dispose of rubbish.

My council was pretty good at waste services even before it started offering this. It will collect my green waste bin, my recycling bin and my rubbish every week. But this service actually gives us so many more recycling options for free.

They collect a bunch of things, from batteries to clothes and printer cartridges. We’ve used them to clear out a whole heap of older stuff we didn’t want to just dump into landfill.

For someone who used to make a buck as a tech journalist and who had countless old gadgets filling up the garage, this has been incredible. I’ve managed to clear old all my old fitness trackers that won’t charge anymore, the old routers that don’t deliver usable speeds anymore and the mobile phones that barely load up, all without having to leave the house.

But while clearing out tech has been great, the big one for us so far has been soft plastics – things like chip wrappers and plastic bags. Every day, we pop our soft plastics into a Coles plastic bag, and then once a month we leave that plastic bag out for Recycle Smart to come and collect.

The impact has been huge. Our landfill bin is down to just one or two bags of rubbish each week. I think that’s pretty good for a family of four.

Each month, Recycle Smart will come and collect two bags for free, but if I need to get rid of more stuff, I can pay $2 a bag to have up to 10 bags collected. So far, I’ve only taken advantage of that service once, but we’ve just cleared out the kids clothes, so we may need to do it again soon.

There’s a dedicated app for the service, which collects data on the types of recycling you do, and you can see how much recycling you have done.

I don’t know how many councils Recycle Smart works with, but it’s definitely been a great addition to our local council’s waste management services.