Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

The amount of plastic that is infecting our environment is, quite simply, frightening. I had the great fortune to work with a local group of volunteers in my electorate called Protect Our 1. It's a group that was established by a young Indigenous man and asks people to volunteer to clean up the beaches along the east coast of Sydney. Protect Our 1 have been very successful in getting a lot of people to come along on a weekend and pick up rubbish and, in particular, plastics from our beaches. I've done several of those beach clean-ups now with Protect Our 1, and the amount of plastic that is collected during these clean-ups is frightening. On a number of occasions, they've used AUSMAP—the organisation that is devoted to reducing the amount of plastic in our waterways—to do collections of microplastics over a very small space of beach. Typically, it's one square metre of beach. The amount of microplastics that they get from one square metre of beach is simply unbelievable—on average, about 4,000 pieces of microplastic per square metre of beach in Sydney. When you look at the number of beaches throughout Australia, that is a very frightening statistic.

CSIRO estimate that there are 14 million tonnes of plastic on the ocean floor, and it's much greater and much worse than they ever expected. Our ocean is literally drowning in plastic. The damage that this can cause to marine life is of course significant. They can often mistake it for food, and it destroys the natural environment and their natural habitats. But it can also harm our health because, if a fish swallows microplastic, guess where it ends up when we eat it? It ends up in our system, and that can't be good for our health.

Not only members of the community but also us in particular as legislators have got an obligation to try to reduce the amount of reusable waste, particularly plastic, that we have in our community and to ensure that more of it is recycled in Australia. And we've got to find a way to coerce the corporations that are producing these recyclable materials to take responsibility for the plastic in their products and recycle a lot more of it. In Australia, not enough of that is happening at the moment.

Most Australians probably don't know what happens to plastics and other recyclables once they put them in their bins at home. We've been successful in Australia in changing the culture around domestic recycling. Most local government areas will now have a separate recycling bin. In the area that I live in, it's the yellow bins, and we've been successful in encouraging people to separate their household waste and put their paper, cardboard, plastics and other recyclables into those yellow bins. I think I'd be on fair ground in saying that, when most Australians do this, they probably feel good; they probably feel like they're doing something to reduce the amount of waste, particularly into landfill, and to ensure that we're protecting the environment. But what they wouldn't know is that, unfortunately, quite a significant amount of what goes into the separate yellow bins ends up in landfill and can end up in our oceans and our waterways.

Up until last year, what occurred with most of that recyclable material, particularly the plastics, is that it was exported to other countries. In 2018-19, Australia exported 4½ million tonnes of recyclables to other nations, up from three million tonnes in 2006-07, so you can see how significant the growth had been. There is no doubt that, unfortunately, some of that ended up in landfill. We've simply been exporting our problem to other nations, and some of those are developing nations that don't have the environmental protections that Australia has, and that material would have no doubt ended up in waterways and in landfill.

A shift occurred in 2018 when the Chinese government decided that they were no longer going to accept imported recyclables from other nations. What followed then was similar announcements by other nations that were importing recyclable materials, and they included India, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand. So, if this recyclable material is not being exported by Australia at the moment, where it is going? Most Australians are unclear on that—in fact, most of us are unclear on that—because the answer isn't simple at all. Some of it is still being exported to nations like Indonesia, which still accepts some of our recyclable materials. A small proportion of it is recycled, but unfortunately the larger proportion of it simply goes into landfill. I think it's really misleading the Australian public about all of this cultural change that they've been through in recent decades to try and change the view of how we treat waste in Australia when it simply still goes into landfill. Australians are being vigilant—they're doing the right thing—but at our level we're being lazy and we haven't put in place the practices and regulation that are required to ensure that more of this material is recycled in the future. I was horrified when I recently spoke to a local government representative in the community that I represent and asked him where the recyclable material in our yellow waste bins was going, and his response was, 'Most it's going into landfill.'

Thankfully, in March this year, COAG agreed to ban the export of waste materials—plastic, glass, tyres and paper. That export ban from Australia begins on 1 January next year, with glass, and works through to all of those materials being banned for export by 2024. So we need to develop our own domestic recycling capacity. We need to make sure that we as legislators are doing the right thing by the Australian public, who expect us to put in place the measures to produce better outcomes and ensure that more of this material is recycled.

This legislation is a step in the right direction. There is no doubt about that. That's why Labor is supporting it. But it doesn't go far enough. There's much more that we could be doing to ensure that more of this material is recycled. This legislation will establish a new licensing and declaration scheme with standard qualifying requirements, and fees and charges to cover administrative costs, conditions, reporting and auditing arrangements, and processes for seeking exemptions to the licensing requirements. The bills also replace the existing product stewardship laws, making some long overdue changes to the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme and enabling the minister to make recommendations to indicate time frames by which industry should achieve better outcomes in taking responsibility for the life cycle of their products.

On product stewardship, I don't believe that industry and government are doing enough to encourage more responsibility by corporations for, in particular, the plastics they produce with their products. Manufacturers need to bear that responsibility for the life cycle of the goods they are producing and that are consumed by Australians. This is an area where the government has failed. The product stewardship scheme was initially established by the Gillard government. It has different elements to it: there is a voluntary capacity, there is a co-regulatory capacity and there is a mandatory capacity. When you look at the outcomes, it has been a dismal failure under this government. There is only one party operating in the co-regulatory scheme. And guess how many are operating in the mandatory scheme? None. No organisations are operating under the mandatory scheme. And this government has not listed any items to include in that scheme. So there is a huge free-rider problem with this scheme. Other corporations are saying, 'If it's not mandatory, why would I? There are additional costs associated with it. Why would I participate?' And guess what? They're not. So all this plastic—in particular, water bottles—is ending up in our oceans, in our waterways, and too much of it is ending up in landfill. So I believe the government has a responsibility to put in place measures to change that and ensure that more of this material ends up being recycled. That is simply not happening at the moment.

It's a shame that it took a ban on waste imports by China and several other nations for the government to finally do something. That has resulted in this legislation. The Australian community and our waste and resource management sector are crying out for national leadership on reforms that not only reduce landfill and plastics pollution but actually build the foundation of a sustainable and circular economy in which materials are recycled and reused, and waste is reduced to a bare minimum. Up to eight million tonnes of plastic makes its way into the oceans each year and global consumption of plastic could triple by 2040. Our nation only recycles 12 per cent of plastics and 58 per cent of waste in total. Some analyses indicate that Australia will need to increase local plastics reprocessing capacity by 400 per cent in order to be effective in recycling this waste that we have now stopped exporting.

We have a very poor record on plastics in particular, yet Australia stands heavily affected by plastics pollution. In order to improve our poor rate of recycling when it comes to environmentally harmful materials like plastics, it's vital that we dramatically improve our local processing and manufacturing markets. But that will only be viable if there are end markets for this material, if there are end markets for the recycled product. In addition to supportive procurement policy, there needs to be better and greater producer responsibility when it comes to product design and the incorporation of recycled content.

Unfortunately, what we've got from this government are recycled policies and recycled announcements. In July, the Minister for the Environment announced the $190 million Recycling Modernisation Fund. That was then renounced in the budget. Last year's $100 million Recycling Investment Fund has not advanced one single dollar, and last year's $20 million Product Stewardship Investment Fund has not made a single grant. And that's the point: we are facing this problem of not being able to export our recyclables—which I think is a good thing; we shouldn't be forcing our problems onto other nations—but we haven't put in place the measures to deal with it domestically. The evidence of that is in the establishment of these funds by this government and not one dollar invested in the Product Stewardship Investment Fund through a single grant. That is a failure. That is a failure from this government that we are all paying the cost of and our environment in particular is paying the cost of. We need to do more.

I want to finish by congratulating some of the local government areas that exist in my community for some of the actions that they're taking. I think it's great to see, although we've had this lack of leadership from the Morrison government on this issue, that local government and state governments are taking the lead in the absence of that leadership. Randwick council recently introduced a new food and organic waste system whereby in future food and organics will be able to be placed in a separate bin at Randwick City Council and that material will then go into composting. It will ensure it has avoided going into landfill. It's estimated that 50 per cent of landfill is made up of food and organic waste material that produces methane. We can do it if we put in place the right measures. I want to congratulate Randwick council because they're showing leadership in the absence of this government showing leadership. This bill is a step in the right direction but it doesn't go far enough. We really need more responsibility around product stewardship and we need this government to take leadership on recycling.

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