There is a lot of negative media about waste management in Australia but in 2019 we are presented with a number of opportunities that have the potential to turn waste management around.
On the negative side, Australians are buying ever greater levels of goods and producing higher levels of waste. Australian’s are among the highest consumers of resources and energy in the world and are reluctant to take responsibility for their waste, preferring post-consumer solutions.
More products are produced to have a short life span and be unreusable or unrecyclable. Waste reduction efforts are myopic, focusing on banning plastic straws and coffee cups. Some councils are looking to ban single-use plastic take- away from the packaging but in Tasmania, only Hobart is considering this.
In September 2018 the Australian government joined the packaging industry in announcing their commitment to ambitious targets to reduce packaging waste and do away with some forms of packaging by 2025. Media reports largely ignored the fact that the industry’s previous packaging reduction targets were repeatedly missed and there is no reason to believe the new targets will be achieved.
The state government went to the election with a waste policy that focused solely on cleaning up major rubbish dumps and creating harsher penalties for those found responsible. They ignored the broader waste issues and have no strategy for how to enforce the new penalties.
There is a negligible amount of construction and demolition waste being reused or recycled in Tasmania and the community largely remains ignorant of this.
But there has been an enormous increase in awareness of waste issues as a result of the War On Waste ABC television series and the China crisis. These two factors are probably the reason that both the Australian and Tasmanian governments announced reviews of their respective waste strategies. In the short term the TCT will focus on providing input to the revision of the Tasmanian Waste and Resource Management Strategy 2009. Also, the State Minister for Environment Elise Archer is very interested in waste which was not the case with the previous minister.
Waste measurement and education: One of the reasons that there is so little action on waste management from government and industry is that they fail to report to the community on the full extent of the waste problem. The community does not know the full extent and impact of our waste production and therefore doesn’t know how we are performing. Few people equate waste production with carbon emissions.
The 2009 Waste Strategy proposed waste management education programs to encourage waste avoidance and reduction as well as improved waste recovery. These programs had little effect but it probably wasn’t due to a lack of funding. The combined waste education budget of the state government, councils and regional organizations was very significant but they were not well coordinated and targeted.
The strategy needs to support a consumer education program to drive more informed and responsible consumption and purchasing behaviours by consumers, businesses and all levels of government, to drive down overall consumption. While the government will not want to encourage less retail spending, we could persuade them to help consumers to limit food waste and buy quality products that last longer and cost less over time.
Waste management principles: A waste strategy needs to be based around the waste management hierarchy and principles of shared responsibilities instead of our current obsession with post-consumer solutions such as recycling. The hierarchy is an upside-down triangle that represents the need to deal with most waste by avoiding or reducing and then lesser amounts by reusing, recycling and disposal. Waste management also requires responsibility to be shared between everyone involved with a given product i.e. designer, manufacturer, transporter, wholesaler, retailer, and purchaser.
Targets: A waste strategy needs to establish targets for diversion of waste from landfill for each waste sector and for each landfill site. Tasmania has never had waste targets and it is critical that key stakeholders agree on ambitious long term targets along with realistic and significant short term targets.
Funding innovation: To meet targets a waste strategy needs to support measures to provide the waste management industry with finance to invest in new waste management technology, infrastructure, product development, and marketing. The waste management industry is still in its infancy and needs assistance from the government to scale up and be cost-competitive with government-owned landfill operators and competitors interstate and overseas. The TCT and the WMAA have favored a levy being put on waste sent to landfill that is hypothecated for investment into waste management innovation.
A levy has two benefits, first, it increases the price of disposal to landfill and will make some waste producers take waste elsewhere to be reused, treated or recycled, making these businesses more profitable. Levies can also be collected and directed onto industry development to improve waste management. Levies in other states have been hugely successful. A 2016 Local Government Association of Tasmania report concluded that a $10 per tonne landfill levy, directed into waste innovation programs, would have negligible negative economic impacts while helping to fund new waste management investment.
Partnerships, coordination and planning: There needs to be a body that provides coordination and planning to ensure the waste strategy is being implemented and kept up to date and brings together key stakeholders and assists them. The Waste Management Council, which was dissolved by the previous minister, was supposed to perform this function but failed comprehensively. The next strategy needs to recommend a coordinating body that has sufficient powers and capacity to drive the strategy implementation.
China crisis: A waste strategy needs to provide a long term response to the China crisis. This crisis is a result of consumers in Australia and elsewhere contaminating their recyclables. Councils have mysteriously avoided any public discussion of the causes of the problem and quietly renewed contracts for kerbside collection, presumably at higher prices. The state government needs to make sure a proper solution is put in place that ensures Tasmania’s plastic, paper and cardboard, in particular, meets the strict Chinese contamination levels or it is recycled in Australia. This should be a great opportunity for local recyclers but councils don’t recognize this.
We need to challenge the community to acknowledge the high contamination of recyclables and make some tough decisions. Do we simply divert plastic packaging to landfill and potentially incineration and focus on bigger waste issues? Do we attempt to reduce contamination which will require a much more sophisticated inter-reactive approach to public education than has been the case? Or do we have a halfway measure where we recycle only the largest and most readily identifiable packaging e.g. plastic bottles without lids, to ensure we meet contamination levels?
To get these major changes to kerbside recycling will require the state government to direct councils to make the changes or better still for councils to be removed from the process. Waste education would be much more consistent and accurate if councils were not involved in communicating with the rate-payers and leave this to regional or state-based organizations. Councils are to politically involved and cannot be expected to give the community unpopular advice about what can be recycled and unacceptable contamination. Critically, education about what is recyclable needs to involve the businesses that do the sorting and recycling and councils have resisted this obvious means of improving education.
A critical change to engender greater confidence in kerbside collection is to have independent auditing to determine how much plastic and other materials are recycled, stored or sent to landfills and whether landfilling was justified because of contamination or other issues.
Container deposit scheme: A waste strategy should support a container deposit scheme (CDS) but the strategy needs to go further to consider what impacts the CDS will have on kerbside collection and recycling industries, and work to reduce the consumption of containers and encourage reuse.
Consumer incentives: Australians are very consumption focused and want lower prices. It is hard to convince them that low prices are a key factor in the production of high levels of waste. If we cannot change values it is best to think of how to use the hip pocket nerve to our benefit.
The success of CDS in most mainland states shows that Australians will participate enthusiastically in waste management programs where there is a financial benefit. While a waste strategy should support the introduction of a CDS it should look more broadly at financial incentives for better waste management. The 2009 strategy provided no guidance regarding incentives and none eventuated.
Peter McGlone
TCT Director