Resident furious after thousands of Woolworths catalogues dumped in front of home

A woman has called for supermarkets to be careful about the distribution of their catalogues, after thousands were dumped outside her apartment block.

In a furious post to the Woolworths Facebook page, the woman said it's been over a week since the pile of brochures were left there, leaving her questioning the distribution methods of supermarket chains.

"It's a shame to see how many trees have been WASTED to produce these that not many of us even look at anymore since everything is available online," she pointed out.

The photo—taken in West Ryde, in Sydney — shows piles of stacked catalogues sitting on top of a brick fence.

Catalogues can be recycled

Suzanne Toumbourou, the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Council of Recycling said the catalogues would be recyclable.

"Paper is recyclable and these forms of paper are recyclable," she told Yahoo News Australia.

"Ideally paper shouldn't be too small or definitely not shredded for household recycling and so above five or six centimetres is the right size for recycling.

"Even though it's been printed in their catalogues and stuff that's still recyclable," she continued.

"It's not very resource-efficient to be producing this without even using it to go back into recycling."

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A spokesperson from Woolworths told Yahoo News Australia they "invest heavily" in the production and distribution of catalogues for the benefit of customers, some of whom have requested physical copies.

"While the vast majority of distributors do the right thing when delivering our catalogues to households, it’s always disappointing to see our catalogues being dumped," they said.

"We have raised our concerns with our suppliers for further investigation and expect they will address it with the distributor involved."

Coles supermarkets ceased delivery of printed catalogues to letterboxes in September 2020 due to the shift in customer preference towards digital communications.

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