Albury Council's waste management team leader Andrea Baldwin presented at the Waste Expo Australia last week in Melbourne, and explained how the city's facility had changed since she started in 2008.

"From an overall perspective, back in 2010 we were burying 126,000 tonnes, and recycling about 59,000 tonnes, and in 2019 we're burying 88,000 tonnes," she said.

"Very little recycling was occurring onsite then; the only things that were being recycled were items like steel and a bit of green-waste.

"My role was to increase the landfill life [from 16 years].

"We've not only been able, through infrastructure and education in our region, to reduce what's going to landfill, but we're actually stopping it going there."

Ms Baldwin said the introduction of a three-weighbridge system that involves free recycling and a new fee structure had contributed.

"It's an almost 5000 tonnes difference [in what is recycled] with the introduction of that weighbridge system," she said.

"When I started, our fees were $30 dollars a tonne and they're now up around $153, which is probably why there was no recycling happening back then.

"Albury didn't have a waste strategy, so we've gone ahead and implemented a lot of innovation and infrastructure ... we are only just now implementing a strategy.

"It has been a fairly big change for our community, in the main comments have been extremely positive ... but I will say that not everyone feels the same way."

The Halve Waste campaign to reduce the waste going to landfill by 50 per cent by 2020 was also attributed to the increase in recovery of waste from 32 per cent to 55 per cent.

"We introduced Halve Waste back in 2010, and the way we funded education in our region was placing a $2.50 per tonne levy on our waste that went to landfill," Ms Baldwin said.

"That has generated around $380,000 a year.

"It is difficult to get education money ... we felt if we were really going to make a lot of change and make sure this landfill would be here for many decades, we needed to put some extra funding into that.

"We do television, broad-scale media, we have a couple education officers who go to our schools.

"Halve Waste does support two education officers, and at some stage we are hoping to bring them in-house, as at this point in time it it's done through a third party.

"That's how we've been able to affect change, having that funding."

Looking ahead, Ms Baldwin told the Waste Expo in Melbourne that a material recovery facility, an education centre, and a $2 million leachate to sewer system project would fill up NSW's fourth-biggest landfill.

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"We will be constructing a construction demolition and demolition MRF facility, I'm hoping by 2021," she said.

"The dirt turned over this week on a half-a-million-dollar project to construct an education centre on site.

"Most of those [education centres] are probably in Melbourne and Sydney, so we're looking forward to that.

"After all of those things have been implemented, there's actually no more room to build anything on-site, so that's something we'll need to consider in the future."

Waste Expo Australia is the largest gathering of waste management and resource professionals in Australia.