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Councillor Connect - 10 July 2025 - Councillor Peter Haggar

As your Councillor, as a Greens representative and as a resident and business owner in the Bega Valley Shire I am committed to helping our shire become better at reducing waste and learning to live ecologically...

Councillor Peter Haggar.

Authorised by Councillor Peter Haggar.

10 July 2025

As your Councillor, as a Greens representative and as a resident and business owner in the Bega Valley Shire I am committed to helping our shire become better at reducing waste and learning to live ecologically.

It was in this spirit that I took the opportunity to attend the ‘Bega Circularity Community Workshop’ held at the Civic Centre at the end of May.

Just to be clear, I went into this workshop with significant concerns about several aspects of the whole Bega Circular Valley proposal and some still exist.

Some of those concerns are:

  1. A conflating of projects with different levels of sustainability and calling them all ‘circular’. Too much of what is being described as ‘circular’ at the moment isn’t actually very circular in my opinion. We can use tools like the 9R Framework 9R Framework - CE Grow Circular to rate projects for their circularity objectively.
  2. Limited diversity of interests of those on the Board of the Bega Valley Circularity Cooperative.
  3. That some circularity initiatives could be perceived as placing too much emphasis on maintaining or building social licence rather than real environmental outcomes.

However, while my concerns remain there was a lot to be optimistic about. The presentation by Aunty Ellen Mundy showed that our shire has sustained people for tens of thousands of years; projects such as Grow the Future are doing amazing work in growing food locally and skilling our young in food production; and the opportunity to start communication so that local people can share knowledge and work toward solutions is fabulous.

The RCC is building a new Church of Circularity (my analogy) in our town of Bega. Some who go to church are true believers, some go for the community, some go for networking and some go in hope of finding romance. Indeed, the same person may attend for different reasons at different times and those reasons may well change over time. All those reasons are valid.

While I am not yet a true believer I may run into you at church.

Please get in touch with me at PHaggar@begavalley.nsw.gov.au

© Bega Valley Shire Council 2025

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