Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the motion by the member for Higgins. With today's fast paced life and the way we're living with everything being disposable, the amount of waste and plastic Australians generate has increased significantly. Growing up, there was no such thing as going down to the shop and buying a bottle of water. You either took a container with you or you drank out of the hose in someone's front yard, if you could find one. We need to consider the cans and plastic drink containers we see on the side of the road, thrown out of car windows as rubbish rather than treated like the resource they could be. It's also a travesty that many of the recycled products, or supposedly recycled products, that go into our yellow bins are often not actually recycled.

I'm part of a government that recognises more needs to be done in waste management and recycling in Australia. I'm also someone who looks at waste and recycling as an opportunity. This industry already adds $6.9 billion to our economy and provides nine jobs for every 10 tonnes of waste recycled, so we need to harness this opportunity and build incentives, like our government's Australian recycling investment plan. We need to provide jobs in this sector and carbon abatement measures and do more to educate our citizens better so that plastic and recycled waste is seen as an asset and not as rubbish. And this is precisely what the Australian Recycling Investment Fund has done. This fund has supported projects that increase our recycling rates, turn our waste back into valuable products and encourage innovation so that resources are not lost to landfill or end up in our waterways or our oceans.

One program boosting the amount of plastic recycled in my region is Round 8 of the Australian government's Cooperative Research Centres Projects. This program has just provided $2.5 million to a Coffs Harbour based company, Plastic Collective, to develop recycling machines that turn waste plastics into money or useable products. I've seen the prototype of this machine and it is fantastic. It will change the way we deal with recycling not just in Australia but around the world—and, more importantly, in developing nations and remote communities. The Shruder, as the Plastic Collective's machine is known, shreds hard and soft waste plastic into small flakes. These flakes can either be on-sold for money or heated through the machine's extruder and turned into filament and other moulded plastic products. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand have already expressed interest in buying the recycling stations.

Plastic Collective CEO, Louise Hardman, says she's already had international companies line up to buy the plastic recycled flakes for reuse in products like sunglasses and make-up bags. They already have orders to fill 50,000 tonnes of shredded material and this is just one small company in Coffs Harbour. While the Shruder recycling stations are still in the development phase, they already support 50 local people who work on part-time jobs on the project. In the future, should demand for the product grow, and I'm sure it will, I am told that a medium-sized manufacturing facility would be required in Coffs Harbour to build the Shruder recycling stations, creating up to 50 jobs.

There are several other innovative projects happening in Cowper that I would like to mention. One of my favourites is also the Otta-Seal road trials happening in Nambucca and Bellingen. Councils have been trialling the use of the Otta-Seal bitumen road product that is made up of three to 15 per cent recycled truck tyres. For the road aggregate, they are using non-specified quarry products which wouldn't ordinarily be used. A major road project that will start early construction work later this year is the Coffs Harbour bypass, and I am looking forward to examining how recycled products may be used in it.

Improving waste management and boosting recycling hold great possibilities for our nation. We are a large nation with a relatively small population, so it makes sense to use our recycled waste in our roads and in a whole lot of other things.

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