Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to speak about this motion on recycling, especially because South Australia, my home state, has shown the way on recycling. As the member for Mayo said, in South Australia we started a deposit scheme with bottles way back in 1977. It was meant to be a controversial thing, but it has worked smoothly for many, many years. We also led in 2009 with plastic and cartons. So for South Australia, this is not a new thing; we have been recycling for many years in our state.

I know that waste management and waste is going to be one of the toughest things to tackle over the coming decade as we see rapid growth in this area, where we use plastics and timbers and a whole range of things, and we use more and more, whether it be batteries, mobile phones, electrical wiring—you name it. There is so much that we use that gets dumped into landfills. We are finding that we have just about seen the end of being able to ship it off, as we have done in the past, and say, 'Waste out of sight, out of mind.' I think those days are soon going to be behind us. We have to be sensible about reducing our carbon footprint and properly focus on our recycling efforts. This is a task for every single citizen and every Australian.

As I said, I am proud to say that South Australia has been doing well in this area and in this space for many, many years. The United Nations reports that less than 10 per cent of all the world's plastic is recycled. South Australia, my home state, diverts more than 80 per cent of its waste from landfill to be reused in the recyclable economy. This economy, driven by renewable flows of energy, is an adjacent model to the linear economy and aims to regenerate a product of material at its end of life, largely thanks to work started under the former Labor state government.

But it is not just up to governments and individuals. Workplaces, offices and factories need to ensure that they are also focused. There is a great organisation in my electorate called Advanced Plastic Recycling, based in Regency Park. Advanced Plastic Recycling has transformed discarded materials into furniture and other alternatives. They have been doing this for the last 16 years. The company converts melted high-density plastic pellets into a wood plastic composite—they use a little bit of wood as well—for private infrastructure pieces. From this material, they make everything from bollards to benches and boardwalks—and many more things. It's a great initiative by Advanced Plastic Recycling, in my electorate, in Regency Park. I congratulate them for having the innovative insight to do this.

Of course, in South Australia, as I said, we've had the container deposit scheme for a very long time, and it's led the nation with a 77 per cent rate of return of containers. While this may be controversial in other states where they are trying to implement it, in South Australia we've been doing it for a long time without a blink of an eye, and 77 per cent is a big return rate of containers. It was just last year that I met with a French delegation that was here in our parliament. They were very interested in the container deposit scheme that we have in South Australia. When they had their talks in South Australia with the government and others, they discussed it to learn ways to turn their minds to waste management and the recycling schemes.

We produce a lot of waste in Australia on a per capita basis, and we don't reuse or recycle nearly enough of it, only a miniscule amount of it. It would be good for the government and everyone involved to take a more national approach to recycling and waste management, like France is saying they're going to do. Just like climate change, we need leadership on this issue. We can't afford to play chicken with our planet any longer. We know that, for example, $6.9 billion is added to the economy from recycling, and, for every 10,000 tonnes of recycled material, nine jobs are created. So there are all positives in this; there are no negatives—we clean up our environment, we create jobs, we add to the economy and we ensure that we don't just dump things in landfills.

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