CASEY Global Friendships has chosen Sister Cities Day Sunday 5 July to launch its Wall of Global Friendships at the Balla Balla Centre, Cranbourne.
A joint effort by community groups and the City of Casey resulted in the wall being built to recognise Casey’s div-erse cultural community and sister city relationships.
The wall is an outdoor community space designed to recognise the contribution of different ethnic groups settled in the municipality. It builds on cultural understanding between nations all over the world through the people to people movement to which Casey Global Friendships through Sister Cities Australia belongs.
Sister Cities Australia also develops strong commercial contacts for trade between countries.The most recent being an agreement to have waste from Monte Dore on New Caledonia, 1500 kilometres east of Brisbane, brought to the recycling factory Amcor Recycling in Petrie, Queensland.
Waste material is a worldwide problem and I have seen articles about waste in some countries being stored in old ships offshore or even dumped in the ocean because densely populated countries have nowhere for it to go. New Caledonia has a major waste and recycling problem and it was friendship links between two cities through Sister Cities Australia that led to an arrangement for waste to be shipped from Monte Dore to Brisbane.
Last month 100 tonnes of waste material arrived and had been processed with profits for both countries.