Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are few better examples of waste management and waste reduction than what's occurring in restaurants and cafes in the beautiful Blue Mountains. Leura and its amazing cafes, which I urge everyone in this place to visit, are combining to become the first village in Australia to eliminate restaurant food waste going to landfill. Take the award-winning Leura Garage as an example. The owner, James Howarth, has taken great care to reduce the restaurant's carbon footprint and now composts all the business's organic waste using closed loop organics. Microbial technology reduces waste volumes by up to 90 per cent in 24 hours and that means lower disposal costs and it also creates a nutrient-rich reusable product. The compost then heads to the Big Fix in Blackheath where it is combined with soil and used to grow produce. This is a business that takes its waste seriously but it is just one example of how residents living in the Blue Mountains World Heritage area are trying to reduce waste and shrink their carbon footprint.

The most up-to-date data available shows mountains residents diverted 55 per cent of household waste from landfill. This was particularly impressive given that the figure just five years earlier was 19 per cent. A key environmental challenge for places like the Blue Mountains and neighbouring Hawkesbury, which make up Macquarie, my electorate, is to reduce waste generation rates so that we improve the health and lifespan of the limited landfill. Bushfires and other natural disasters pose a real risk to the life of the landfill because they generate huge amounts of waste, with the potential to fill landfill years faster than projected under the business-as-usual generation rates—yet another cost you add up if you do nothing to reduce the impacts of climate change.

Hawkesbury residents are also following this lead, diverting about 30 per cent of waste from landfill. The message has reached our schools and a great example was Windsor High School, which last year won a Hawkesbury City Council award for its environmental program, which focused on rubbish reduction, recycling and created the Cash Cage project which is used to separate different recyclable items. The student community decided that money earned from the return-and-earn program would be used to buy compost bins, so they are doing even more to reduce waste and improve the soil quality on the school grounds and in its agricultural plot.

Recently, Hawkesbury Remakery was opened, a not-for-profit organisation working as a self-sustaining social enterprise business. The Remakery in historic Windsor Mall features a wide variety of makers and their products from crocheters and sewers to upcyclers and traditional artists. Boomerang Bags will be set up permanently in the co-making space, creating reusable bags from old fabric to replace plastic bags. And they'll make possum socks to be used by WIRES volunteers for native wildlife. It's all done from things that have been recycled and reused. You can get sewing repairs done, you can be creative and you can turn someone's castoffs and rubbish into your own work of art.

I think we've all seen in our own electorates that people are really embracing a huge range of recycling and are reusing things in order to reduce waste at a local level. We have men's sheds and we have the tool libraries, like Toolo in Katoomba. We have worm farms, the scraps going to the chooks and the composting that happens in backyards right around my region. But we have to remember that even after diverting more than half of their waste, households in one half of my electorate still sent 7,806 tonnes to landfill in a six-month period. That's heavier than the wrought iron used in the Eiffel Tower. That's a lot of waste! That's why funding for initiatives to help reduce waste and to recycle more is always welcome, and research by the CRCs into how we do that better is crucial. Technology can help us, and I'm pleased to hear those opposite saying that they do need to listen to the science on this.

We also need to help our neighbours so we can clean up the Pacific, which is littered with plastic waste. Australia's coasts and marine species are already profoundly affected by the scourge of microplastic and plastic not breaking down, ending up in turtles' stomachs. My colleague the shadow minister for the environment and water pointed out late last year that the bulk of the coalition's $167 million so-called Australian Recycling Investment Fund is actually $100 million rebadged from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, so let's be transparent about this. As a nation, we recycle less than 12 per cent of our plastic waste. We need to be really genuine about our commitment to reducing it. (Time expired)

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