Elster Creek Litter Collaboration

Melbourne Water is collaborating with Glen Eira City Council, City of Port Phillip, the Environment Protection Authority Victoria, and other partners to develop a holistic, data-driven approach to preventing litter entering Port Phillip Bay through Elster Creek. 

Why this project is important 

The Elster Creek Catchment is a highly urbanised area that drains through the Elster Creek into Port Phillip Bay. In all urban catchments, litter management is an ongoing challenge, with litter from shopping strips, parklands, construction sites, and industrial areas being carried by rainfall or winds into local drains that meet our treasured waterways.  

Sometimes there are opportunities to collect litter along the stormwater system. But litter infrastructure like gross pollutant traps and floating litter traps are expensive to install, expensive to maintain, and are designed to get bypassed or overtopped in heavy rains to avoid the risk of flooding. In the Elster Creek catchment this is a particular challenge, where the low-lying land is subject to flooding and the flows from the upper catchment can come down suddenly.

To protect our Bay environment and our waterways, it doesn’t make sense to simply ‘catch litter at the end’, but instead put effort into stopping litter at the source and preventing it from getting washed into our stormwater systems in the first place. 

Project overview

We’ve established a collaborative Working Group to deliver a whole-of-catchment Elster Creek Litter Action Plan.  

The analysis of litter being generated across the catchment will include understanding why littering occurs, where it comes from, how it’s transported, what management measures are already in place (and how well they are working) and identifying the best-bet improvements and new solutions.  

The Elster Creek Litter Action Plan that follows the analysis will explore opportunities to improve education, enforcement, maintenance and infrastructure where those actions will have the most impact. Examples of actions include: 

• Improvements in maintenance, e.g. more effective street sweeping and emptying of public bins to stop litter getting flushed into drains  
• Targeted compliance to ensure commercial operators are managing their rubbish on site effectively  
• Coordinated communications and education campaigns to influence behaviour change  
• Reviewing the effectiveness of existing infrastructure and maintenance, and prioritising where new infrastructure and maintenance improvements should be implemented, and  
• Using smart technologies to improve how litter is managed throughout the system.  

Through this collaboration, we’ll also work with our communities to understand their concerns around litter management and use their local knowledge to refine our approaches.  

Supporting activities

While we pull together the data and identify the best solutions, partners are also investing in shorter term actions to improve litter management in the catchment: 

• Melbourne Water is reviewing the function of the two existing litter traps in the downstream section of Elster Creek, to understand if they are working effectively or could be improved 
• Melbourne Water has increased the frequency of manual litter collection along the Elster Creek canal 
• Glen Eira City Council is auditing the gross pollutant traps around the municipality to identify priority renewals or repairs 
• Delivery of further stages of the Chain of Ponds and wetland systems in Yalukit Willam Reserve, which will ensure litter is filtered out of any stormwater travelling from the Bayside municipal area.