TWO used mattresses have been dumped in one of the city’s cemeteries.
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Remembrance Parks Central Victoria staff were alerted to the discarded items at White Hills cemetery on Monday morning.
The stained mattresses were found well beyond the neatly manicured grounds closest to the Vahland gates.
A few graves are nestled atop the wooded area within the highest part of the grounds.
The mattresses were piled to the side of a track leading to those graves.
RPCV spokeswoman Joanne Trickey said it was evident how the mattresses came to be there.
She spotted tyre tracks leading up to the pile.
The mattresses weren’t the only discarded items recently discovered at the cemetery.
An amount of rubber tubing was found in a nearby clearing.
Ms Trickey said the responsibility for properly disposing of the waste would fall to RPCV rather than those responsible for dumping it.
“It’s not really OK. We have a tip for that – there’s a process,” she said.
The City of Greater Bendigo charges $20 per mattress disposed at its landfills and transfer stations.
Fees and charges range from $2.10 per bag of domestic waste to $170 per tonne at Eaglehawk Landfill.
Ms Trickey said a tyre was among the items cleared from the cemetery on Clean Up Australia Day.
A car tyre costs $6.20 to properly dispose of at the city’s landfills.
The resources RPCV had to expend clearing people’s rubbish could be better spent on maintaining and beautifying the remembrance parks, Ms Trickey said.
But, more importantly, the waste left at the site conveyed a lack of respect.
Ms Trickey said people were generally respectful of the parks under the organisation’s care and rubbish was not often an issue at the sites.
But the instances in which rubbish was found at the cemeteries would not be tolerated.
A member of the public brought the mattresses to RPCV’s attention.
“We really do rely on people to let us know if they see something that’s odd,” Ms Trickey said.
The cemetery, which has been used as a burial site since 1853, is listed on the Victorian Heritage Database.