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

I am actually quite pleased to have a chance to stand in this House and talk about waste and recycling, because I actually have a great passion for this, as many people in my community know. For me, the thing that we are wasting at the moment is the opportunity that is in waste. The whole world at the moment is trying to transition from a society that uses more stuff than it needs, that uses once and throws away, that makes plastic that lasts forever and then uses it once. We're all trying to transition, and the technology that's being developed around the world is happening quite rapidly, but in Australia we've had the pause button pushed on this for seven years now. So I just want to talk a little bit about where we are at the moment—the basic details of where we are when it comes to waste.

On average, there are a bit more than 2½ tonnes of waste produced for every one of us every year. That includes about 100 kilograms of plastic, and we recycle or reprocess barely 10 per cent of that. We drill for oil, we make plastic and then we bury it in the dirt. Eighty per cent goes into landfill, where it, of course, lasts forever. We use it once and we bury it forever, because it's not biodegradable.

According to the 2017-18 Australian plastics recycling survey, we only managed to recycle 9.4 per cent of the 3.4 million tonnes of plastic consumed in Australia. That's worse than in any other year since 2014-15. So we're going backwards, not forwards. The report, which was commissioned over the summer, on the recycling market found that our plastics recycling capability is lower now than it was in 2005. There is three million tonnes of plastic that we don't recycle, and the best we can hope for is that it goes into landfill rather than into our oceans.

This is an appalling situation for a developed economy that has the capacity to solve these problems right now—and we have had that capacity for quite some time. Australia was late to the party anyway. Everybody in the community has known for a long time that we need to do better with what we are doing. Labor started the process back in 2009 by creating a national waste policy, establishing a national waste reporting process and introducing the Product Stewardship Act 2011—an incredibly important act at the time, which dealt with the requirement that companies manage the entire life -cycle of the products they make. The National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme was started, but that was the only one.

That was in 2011. Nearly 10 years later, we have had seven years of a conservative Liberal government and we haven't had one more item added to that. Nothing has happened since that stewardship plan was started. In fact, there were two voluntary programs and one of them has disappeared. So we've actually gone backwards since 2011. This is in absolute contrast to the attitudes of the community. My community are years ahead of this government in their desire to recycle and their willingness to do something about it. There are 35,000 people in the Facebook 'buy, swap and sell' group in Parramatta and another 13,000 just over the highway in Granville. There are thousands and thousands of people who know they have to do better and are trying to do so.

Most of us are still concentrating on plastics and the stuff we put through our recycling bins. But if we had been doing what we should have been doing for the last 20 years, let alone the last seven, we would now be talking about clothing, over 95 per cent of which ends up in landfill. It takes hundreds of litres of water to make one cotton T-shirt, and we wear it for six months and throw it into landfill. It's an extraordinary waste. Yet the technology to recycle cotton now exists. About three years ago, two companies in the US worked out how to do it. The technology exists to take that incredibly valuable and unique product and use it over and over again. It costs so much in resources to make, but what a great product it is—but not if you only use it once.

Also, we are not talking about water recycling. We have single-use water in our cities. We use drinking water once. It's absolutely bizarre. We should be talking about waste when it comes to that. We should be talking about waste when it comes to compost. My community is really keen to start serious community composting, but where is the support from the government for that? We know that 60 per cent of landfill is compostable, yet it is still in landfill.

At great risk to myself, I would also like to mention phosphorus. The world is running out of phosphorus. We actually get it from bird urine; we call it bird poo but it is actually bird urine. It is really high in phosphorus. We've been digging it up and using it for fertiliser for years, and the world is running out. In Western Sydney we have one of the largest mineable sources of phosphorus in Australia. It is actually in our urine—and we flush it down the toilet. It's incredibly easy to process; it's not dirty. Yet we mix it with stuff that is hard to process, faeces, and we shove it down the loo and flush it to heaven knows where. It is kind of funny that we do that. In other parts of the world, people are starting to look at the technology to recapture that. Phosphorus is rare and extremely valuable, and we just throw it away without thought—because we can. Most of the things I'm talking about are things we do because we can. We thought we could keep going, but we now know that we can't.

In my community, there are a number of people who are really starting to work hard on this, and some of them have been there for a long time. I particularly want to mention the Bower. The Bower's been around, in one form or another, for years and years. It's been in Parramatta for a short period of time. They launched a right-to-repair campaign recently, asking that manufacturers produce goods that are fixable—ensuring spare parts are easily available and ensuring Australians can make reasonable attempts to repair goods without risk of voiding their warranty. A right to repair would also encourage manufacturers to make high-quality, long-lasting goods in the first place, rather than products that conveniently die as soon as the warranty expires. They launched a petition calling on the government to act as we move towards a circular economy. This is incredibly important work. If you are in the community of Parramatta, or anywhere in Western Sydney, and you want to be better at repairing stuff, they run fantastic workshops as well. They are a really interesting organisation, and they are doing what they need to do to make this world a better place.

The Bower and the Generous and the Grateful, another organisation, collect furniture which can be reused and recycled. It is really amazing work. They have so many donations now, they can't find enough places to put them. So they're now trying to develop their market. Incidentally, when they first tried to apply for the environment grants program that each electorate was given, their application was rejected on the grounds that finding a market for recyclable goods wasn't eligible, and we had to fight really hard to get it included. If you're so far ahead, as an organisation that's been around for 20 years or more, and you can collect so much material you have to look at the demand side, that's where the money should go. Otherwise, they collect it and it goes back into landfill. It is an extraordinary organisation doing truly, truly amazing things.

I want to come back to the product stewardship issue. Again, this is incredibly important. There are some recyclers in Australia at the moment. On is called Soft Landing, which recycles hundreds of thousands of mattresses. They have very good relationships with the large mattress manufacturers. That is one area where product stewardship really should have been in place for quite some time, because the major manufacturers have already been working with the recyclers to move down that path. There's very low-hanging fruit that has sat there, hanging off the trees, for many, many years. We're a little concerned about the product stewardship review and that the changes to product stewardship that are made in this bill are not strong enough. They leave far too much to industries and manufacturers to work out themselves. We've seen with that 'let them sort it out themselves' approach over the last seven years that not much happen. There are free-rider problems that this bill doesn't solve as well. So we're a little concerned that this doesn't go far enough. As late as it is, we would have expected more on the table at the moment.

The government also has to lift its game when it comes to recycling labels. Th results of an independent audit recently showed that when it comes to lifting our woeful waste and recycling performance, the labelling regime is falling a long way short, not just for recyclers but for people who want to recycle that bit of plastic or cardboard or whatever it is that's in their hands. The audit was commissioned by the Australian Council of Recycling, and the report found 88 per cent of product packaging could be recycled—88 per cent is getting up there—but only 40 per cent featured a recycling label, and some of the labels were wrong or misleading. So 88 per cent might have been recyclable, but a high percentage didn't have appropriate labels. Even more concerning is that only 28 per cent of Australian products used the Australasian Recycling Label, an initiative launched and paid for in part by the Morrison government. But it is not being applied or used in the way that it should be. Again, there was a nice announcement but not very good follow-through. The report found a:

Lack of any disposal labelling, as seen on 51% of products, may also lead to consumers wrongfully placing non-recyclable items into their kerbside recycling bin …

We all know that when you do that you contaminate a whole truck-load of recycling materials.

We also, of course, need to seriously look at recycling within Australia. It's been few years now since China gave the warning that it would stop accepting our less than adequate recyclable material. Because it wasn't sorted, it was contaminated; it just wasn't useable. We take material that comes separately out of households and stick it all together, and, in doing so, make it more expensive and more difficult to work with. It's been years since that was announced, and we are still nowhere near it. The Morrison government commissioned an independent analysis that showed that Australia may require a 400 per cent increase in recycling infrastructure capacity to cope with the additional waste from the export ban, and that is within just a couple of years.

There are a lot of people in my community, as I said before, who really, really want to do more on this. I am going to suggest to them and to this House that we as a community really need to start the change ourselves. This government is not going to do it at the speed in which the community wishes. We have an opportunity in the Parramatta area in the next couple of years. The major recycling contract expires in two years, which means we have an opportunity to move from a situation where we are simply freighting rubbish to a location to a situation in which we can have a number of businesses work locally to genuinely produce recyclable and reusable materials. There will be extraordinary opportunities in the next two years if we work together. I suggest to anybody in my electorate who really wants to get together, have look at what is going on, find others that care about this, identify other community composting programs, if that's what you're interested in, and have a look at what local businesses are around that can help the community do what it wishes to do to go onto my website and click on 'local solutions' and sign up. We will get together later in the year. We will start seriously talking through what we can do about this.

The opportunities in this are amazing. The opportunities in genuine recycling and a genuine circular economy are quite extraordinary. People in my community went to a circular economy forum in numbers about seven years ago. They've been ready for a long time. So let's get together and see what we can do. We can't really wait. No matter what the government does, we still need to change our behaviours and cultural approach to waste in our communities as well. So let's get together and see what we can do.

See this speech in context