Salty winds blow across the dark ocean, passing the steep limestone cliffs that tower above the beach. 

It’s bin collection morning in Jan Juc. Waste workers drive through this suburb along the Great Ocean Road. Bird calls and the rustles of marsupials among vegetation add to the soundscape.

It won’t take long until drivers run into a problem that is all too common in Australia: winds have knocked over residential bins throughout the night, and contents are all out on the street. 

A hundred kilometres away in Melbourne, winds match the ferocity of the ones here, toppling over bins and wreaking damage on the environment. Uncontained rubbish will contribute to the 8 million items of litter that enter the marine environment in Australia each day.

This is why landscaper and Jan Juc local Colin Cox created a latching device to secure the lids firmly to wheelie bins. He calls it the Litter Lock.

“I’m really precious about my home, where I live and about protecting it. That was a driving force for me to clean up my local area and see if I can make a difference,” Cox said.

The Litter Lock is made of a plastic clip that hooks over one side of the bin lid. This attaches to a hinge on the body of the wheelie bin, with a plastic beam running parallel down its side.

When a collection truck’s side-loading arm pushes on this beam it releases the latch holding down the bin lid, allowing the truck to tip rubbish from the bin into the truck as normal.

“It doesn’t make a great deal of sense that if you can stop [rubbish spillage from bins] before it happens that you’re not going to do that," Cox said. 

While there is ample research about what types of litter make their way into the local environment, there isn’t much information out there regarding the origins of litter in Australia.

“When I started looking into the extent of it, I was blown away because I didn’t understand how much damage it’s causing,” he said.

“It’s a widespread issue that people just sort of look at and go, 'Oh well, it’s all a part of the process', and no one does anything about it.”

A 45-minute drive from Jan Juc lies the beachside town of Lorne. Here, cockatoos wreak havoc on locals’ wheelie bins. Amidst squawks of cheek, the birds open the plastic lids and rummage through the rubbish, leaving a trail in their wake.

The ongoing problem prompted the Surf Coast Shire to undergo a bin-latch trial in early 2023 — dubbed Operation Lockatoo — when they tested nine bin-lock mechanisms, including the Litter Lock.

After the trial, the council ran surveys that revealed a strong preference for the Litter Lockm with 93 per cent positive feedback received from Lorne locals, more than the other eight mechanisms combined.

“The residents love it. The truck drivers rave about it because they aren’t getting out of their trucks anymore. And they’re seeing a real difference in the amount of litter out in the streets,” Cox said.

The Litter Lock has been put forward for future rollout in the area, subsidised by the council on a needs basis.

Cox says the cockatoos in Lorne "still haven’t worked out how to open our lock yet”.

The City of Monash is undergoing its own six-month bin trial with the Litter Lock and another bin latch, the SafeWaste.

While the trial has not finished, Cox says there have been positive signs, with the City of Monash having seen "a significant difference in the amount of litter ending up in stormwater litter traps in the trial period".

He says the residents are also seeing cleaner streets.

Cox has also sent Litter Locks to the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia to stop dingoes from getting into bins in remote communities, as well as to various regions in Tasmania.

“It really is about getting the message out about the extent of the problem — making people aware that there is a solution to the problem and trying to get people on board,” he says.

“I’d love to do what I tell my kids to do and leave the place in a better position than I found it.”