Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I go out into my community and stand at the train stations and shopping centres, I hear from my community that they are, I suspect, decades ahead of our governments, in terms of what they need when it comes to reducing waste and using waste better. They are decades ahead. Mention community composting and they all say they want to be into it, but councils aren't providing it. Talk about the bigger issues of plastics recycling, the overuse of plastics in our packaging and the use of the wrong plastics and they are ready for action. The federal government needs credit for what it is doing now, but it is late and it is not enough. I don't believe it actually recognises the extraordinary opportunity this nation has to play a significant role in reducing waste and using it better, through the circular economy.

Waste is absolutely an opportunity. We have had our finger on the pause button on this for the last seven years and we have a lot of catching up to do. Waste is not just plastics. I will get to plastics but I want to cover some other areas that we should be talking about as well. I have seen companies recently working to recycle cotton—96 per cent of our clothing goes into landfill. They can make one cotton T-shirt out of 1¼ cotton T-shirts, by extruding it, like viscose. It is an incredible change, which allows an incredibly valuable material like cotton to be used over and over again and keeps it in its life cycle. We have two scientists in Australia who have announced in the last few days that they can now recycle plastic completely—all plastics mixed together—and take it back to its raw form. But they are going to the UK because there is not enough investment in Australia to support what they're doing. We have companies in Ireland and in Europe that are now taking palladium, rhodium and platinum out of road dust, using enzymes. It falls off the catalytic converters, and they collect it and recycle it—and they are making a living out of doing it. It is incredible stuff. We have phosphorus issues all around the world. We know that the world won't run out of phosphorus, because it is an element, but it will end up in our oceans. We are running out of usable phosphorus for our agriculture, and plants don't grow without it. Science tells us that if we collect it in closed systems we could recycle phosphorus at least 40 times before it becomes unusable, yet we use it once. It is applied to the land and then flushes down creeks into the ocean, where it does damage.

We know that it is only a matter of time now, and not a long time, before demand for drinking water exceeds supply—in fact, in some countries it already does—yet in Australia we flush our toilets with drinking water. We don't even use it once before we flush it down our toilets. We don't recycle our washing water or our shower water and use that to flush our toilets. We put drinking water on our gardens. The amount of waste we have in this country that we can address for the future of the world—not just our own future—is quite extraordinary. You can see it in my community: people are starting to take action, to use things they already have—to reuse, recycle, swap and sell, to reduce the land fill of reusable items. We can see the Bower running the campaign Right to Repair, arguing that our toasters, electric jugs and air conditioners should be repairable. Quite often they're not. They also recycle an incredible amount of material through that shop.

We have a Facebook group that has 36,340 followers called Parramatta Buy Swap Sell. It has 36,340 members who swap stuff between them around the area of Parramatta. You'll find so many young people now—if you talk to young people—who buy secondhand and swap and sell clothing. It's an incredible commitment to use less. You can see that movement moving right through the community.

We have sharing maps for Sydney, where you can go online and look at all the different organisations, not for profits and businesses that are starting to emerge in the reuse space, because the community is ahead of this place and ahead of its local councils. It desperately wants to do better. We already see the green shoots in our community. We've see the Darcy Street cafe as the first cafe in Parramatta to simply ban disposable cups. You have to take your cup in. It's doing incredibly well, and it's starting to work with others to do the same thing.

I have small businesses in my community coming to my office every day and complaining that they can't recycle bottles through their waste stream. The council doesn't collect recyclable bottles, so they quite often end up in landfill. There's much more to do for this government to catch up with the community. The announcements they've made are a good step. A lot of it is reusable, recycled money, so it's not new, but there's much more to do. (Time expired)

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