Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to make some remarks on the Product Stewardship Bill 2011 on behalf of the Australian Greens. This is framework legislation that arises from COAG agreeing that the federal government and the states and territories should together establish a national framework to support voluntary, co-regulatory and mandatory product steward­ship and extended producer responsibility schemes to responsibly manage the enor­mous quantities of waste that Australians are generating. This national approach is the kind of policy infrastructure that is necessary to separate contaminating products and valuable products and massively reduce our landfill.

Facts and figures about how we currently handle our waste stream make the case as to why this measure is well and truly overdue. As I have said in committee hearings time and again, on this issue and on related issues that I will touch on, this is a policy portfolio for patient people. This really seems to have taken an inordinate amount of time to come to fruition, and I would like to congratulate the parliamentary secretary for steering us through these final phases, because this is genuinely well overdue. It is often very difficult to detect a sense of urgency amongst policymakers where waste is concerned, because of course historically it has been cheaper to simply dump our trash on a pile than to do something about the extraordinary waste of resources and, of course, the contamination at landfill sites, greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and so on that result—the hidden costs of the enormous profligacy of our consumer society. So it is good to at last be able to say that we can detect the faint stirrings of urgency. Australia uses over 12 billion beverage containers a year, for example. Only about half of those are recycled. Most of the remainder wind up as litter or in landfill. More than four billion plastic bags are given out at supermarkets. Barely any of those are recycled. Four million tonnes of packaging is used and discarded every year. Australians accumulate 18 million used tyres every year. Approx­imately four million tyres are landfilled every year, despite each tyre containing recyclable quantities, up to 1½ kilograms, of steel, half a kilogram of textile and seven kilos of rubber. And instead of responsibly dealing with our tyres, roughly 11 million, or about 60 per cent of them, are exported to Vietnam and China, where they are recycled—if you could call it that—under appalling labour conditions with really quite harmful environmental and public health impacts. In a portfolio where the crossbenches and the opposition support the moves that the government is making, I might call Senator Birmingham's attention, before we go too much further down the track of celebrating the importance of the RIS process, to the fact that this is one instance where a regulatory impact statement was undertaken. Through a process of arcane number-crunching, the economists decided that it was not worth bothering setting up any kind of product stewardship framework for tyres, so now we dump them in countries in our region where they are burnt and 'recycled', with enormously harmful conse­quences for host populations. So I think we need to be extremely cautious before we simply hand over the kind of policy-making decisions we are elected to provide to people with spreadsheets who will just plug a formula in and then two years later a result will fall out that says, 'Don't bother.' That is what happened in the instance of tyres.

Mobile phones, of course, are another nightmare. We have about 24 million in circulation in Australia as at 30 June 2010 in the hands of 70 per cent, or thereabouts, of Australians. They get replaced very often. I am convinced somewhere within each mobile phone there is a piece of software that says, 'Just before the next model is due to hit the market, this one will start getting flaky and then drop dead.' Again, that is a part of our consumer society that we need to draw attention to. We are getting very used to just taking these devices on and then, 20 minutes after they have been released, we feel like we are falling off the back of the curve and we turf them, and they wind up in landfill. Eighteen months to two years is the speed of product turnover in mobile phone markets. There are about 16 million old handsets in cupboards and drawers in Australian homes. Each one of these phones contains substances that we could contemplate as either being extremely hazardous, such as cadmium, lead, nickel, mercury, lithium, arsenic, or being valuable, such as metals like gold, silver and copper and plastics that can be shredded and reused as well.

The MobileMuster is a voluntary scheme, and here again is one example of why we had better be careful before we simply assume that the best solution across the board is for industry to just take care of these things itself. I appreciate the efforts of the people behind the MobileMuster. They have got 3½ thousand collection points around Australia and people can recycle their mobile phones by post. But the fact is—and the minister might like to contradict this figure, but it is the figure I have—we have about a five per cent recovery rate in that voluntary scheme. That is another way of saying we have a 95 per cent non-recovery rate of phones that find themselves in landfill or just wind up in drawers for all time, not being recycled and that material lost to us.

From November 1998 to 30 June 2010, 724 tonnes, including five-and-a-bit million handsets and batteries, were junked. Quite a bit of that can be recycled from the old mobile phones. The nickel in the batteries can be recovered, as can the gold and silver in the circuit boards, and the handset housings and casings can be used to make fence posts, pallets and other things that we make with recycled plastics. I was interested to read in the MobileMuster annual report that one tonne of mobile phone circuit boards can yield the same amount of precious metals as 110 tonnes of gold ore or 123 tonnes of silver-bearing ore and 11 tonnes of copper sulphide ore. So these things are valuable and we need somehow to figure out how to recover that material, and this obviously goes further than just what happens at the end of life. We need to look at the design and manufacture of these devices in the first place so that they are designed to be more easily disassembled. As one of the witnesses to the committee said, even if all the mobile phones that are being stored came out for recycling, MobileMuster does not have the infrastructure to take hold of those and recycle them. I will return to this as an interesting example where the industry has taken on itself to try and do the right thing, but it has not been sufficient, you would say, to actually come to grips with the overall scale of the problem.

Where there is better news is in the area of televisions, computers and so on, involving Product Stewardship Australia and the Australian Information Industry Association, which Senator Birmingham touched on. There we have industry peak bodies that have taken the lead based, I understand, on moves overseas. We are in a global market here and other countries are moving ahead. This is one quite clear-cut example where you can say industry has led from the front in requesting that the government take on and regulate for the entire industry so that people who want to do the right thing are not being competitively disadvantaged by free-riders. It looks as though we are in the process of getting that one right. There were 16.8 million televisions, computers and peripherals that died in 2008. Eighty per cent of those went to landfill; about 10 per cent were recycled. As the digital switchover occurs, as the NBN rolls out, and we know we are undergoing an enormous face of technological innovation in Australia at the moment, that pile of electronic or e-waste is only going to grow into a mountain. That is why it is good to notice that a focus on TVs and computers is welcome as the first scheme, otherwise we would be debating effectively empty legislation—a container bill with nothing in it. But we know that we do have an example of how this framework legislation will be used, and that is welcome.

If we do not get going with that properly, e-waste in Australian landfill will triple by 2020 and be close to 700 million items. That is an extraordinary waste of this material that we all know can be quite transitory as product cycles accelerate. As it is, there are 18 million TVs and 70 million computers and peripherals in landfill or on their way to landfill. These constitute about 38 per cent of current e-waste items in landfill. We know that we need to deal with items like fluorescent tubes, some of which contain mercury, and items like batteries that find their way into landfill and then pose enormous problems with water contam­ination as water percolates through the landfill piles and into local watertables. There is a good news story here about how many jobs, for example, would be created if we dealt responsibly with our waste. The Boomerang Alliance stated that a national recycling scheme for all e-waste would create 5,100 new jobs by 2015. That includes 1,440 direct jobs in the recycling of e-waste and another 3,660 indirect jobs. As Senators will know, I have been pushing for quite some time for a national container deposit scheme to handle the 12 billion beverage containers that are used in this country. If we put monetary value on those containers, we would see many fewer of them end up in our waterways, parks and bushland. So, just as we propose to tax carbon emissions so that the market suddenly sees a price signal on something that we do not want to throw away, we would be placing a tiny premium on the beverage container to give them an economic value. That, in effect, would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by nearly one million tonnes of CO2 per year. That is the equivalent of switching 135,000 homes to 100 per cent renewable energy. All that is based on is the 50-odd per cent of beverage containers that at the moment find their way into streams, the side of the road and landfill, the stuff that we buy, use and discard when we are away from home where recycling rates are obviously very poor. It is about bringing those into the system and recovering those materials—a million tonnes of CO2 per year.

It would save enough water to perman­ently supply more than 30,000 Australian homes. Because we would no longer be discarding the stuff, we would be getting those materials back. It would deliver air quality improvements equivalent to taking 56,000 cars off the road and create approximately 1,000 direct jobs. Our bev­erage containers made up, we are aware, of about 60 per cent of all glass items, 47 per cent of metal items and about a third of plastic items during the 2010 Clean Up Australia Day. Nine out of the top 10 items collected on that day were packaging materials which made up about 80 per cent of all waste collected. This is a huge volume of material at the moment simply going to waste.

There is broad, consistent and very high support in the community for a container deposit scheme. There is a demonstrated willingness to pay. The study was done twice, and now we are buried in the swamp of a regulatory impact statement process being undertaken by the Commonwealth on container deposits that simply has this proposal buried in quicksand. It is not good enough. At best, we think this could result in a scheme being implemented in four years time. Thanks to this analysis paralysis, we have to get faster and better and develop a sense of urgency when something is so obviously a good idea. For every 12 months that we drag our heels on this, another 12 billion beverage containers are used.

On 25 January this year, Northern Territory Chief Minister Paul Henderson put out a blazing press statement calling on the beverage industry to stop their misleading campaign against the cash for containers legislation. It is one of the sharpest pieces of language I think I have ever seen come out of a Premier's or Chief Minister's office where he said that the beverage industry should simply stop wasting its money on deceptive advertising to stop it. How different the situation is when we have got the industry peaks in the case of e-waste, computers and TVs backing a scheme and demanding coherent legislation for their sector and so of course things are moving. The case of the beverage industry could not be in starker contrast where they have dug their heels in and progress has been painfully slow because of the deceptive conduct of the beverage and packaging industries. I still do not completely understand why the hostility is so stark.

I have put these figures on the record to make the point that national approaches to our national waste crisis are very much needed. We have historically had a very weak response to this issue in Australia. We have got litter campaigns which are valuable: they marshal volunteers and get people out to pick material up. We have got industry-led voluntary programs that are limited in extent and need some kind of coherent framework and approach.

The main industry government program is of course the Australian Packaging Covenant, which sounds great but it does not really deliver as much as industry seems to think, despite what we continually hear about in the course of various pieces of committee work that have contributed to this debate. We acknowledge the benefits of the APC, but I do not think they are as great as some in industry believe that they are.

We still have very serious concerns at the extent to which voluntary schemes are emphasised at the expense of mandatory schemes in this bill. I know there is some kind of reflexive opposition on the coalition side to forms of mandatory regulation where a voluntary industry scheme might serve us better. We believe that the amendments that have been jointly negotiated between the Greens, the government and the opposition will sharpen the distinctions between the three kinds of schemes that this bill seeks to bring into force.

We know that if a voluntary program has sufficient resources and organisational capacity then infrastructure can be developed and the outcomes can be very strong. What this bill, I think, will do with a bit of goodwill—and I am happy if the minister wants to confirm this—is put some teeth into the voluntary schemes. Let's hear what the targets are and, if they are not being met, then let's review them and assess whether a scheme should maybe shift from being voluntary to co-regulatory. If a co-regulatory scheme is letting us down, then let's assess if those targets are failing to be met; let's move it up to a mandatory scheme.

Co-regulatory programs work when the industry wants them to, and I am very happy to give credit where it is due to the television and computer industry who obviously want to do something about their waste, as I say, driven by international imperatives to bring our extraordinary waste production under control.

We have worked with the government to ensure that the bill does not use federal powers to extinguish good state schemes. I would hate to see, for example, a defective container deposit scheme get up that squashed the good work that has been done in South Australia over the last 30 years or the initiative taken by the Northern Territory. We will be asking the government, when we drop into the committee stage, to clarify how that is going to work.

We have also worked constructively to address an issue that came up during the committee inquiry into the bill regarding the need for the minister to have some guidance and input from experts to help identify priorities and monitor progress and next steps. I think that is something that every single witness who came before the committee said should happen and I am glad that we have government and, I think, opposition support for those amendments by the Australian Greens to set the priorities. Such an advisory panel existed to guide the New South Wales product stewardship legislation. The independent committee in New South Wales was made up of experts, non-government organisations and industry reps. That was involved in establishing a list of priority products so that industry knew where the system was going and the prioritisation process was transparent for the community. That advice was offered on an ongoing basis.

We will also, when we get to the committee stage, make amendments to the objects clause of the bill that we think is very important, and I will discuss that shortly. I would like to thank the committee for its excellent and very useful report that provided a very useful distillation of the waste crisis in our country. We perhaps take our committee staff here for granted from time to time because of how regularly they astound us by their professionalism and efficiency but this report, I think, actually stands out. I would also like to thank the non-government organisations who work very hard in an, I suppose, unglamorous area of waste policy. It is work that is nonetheless extraordinarily important for the larger project of creating a genuinely sustainable Australia, for cleaning up our act, for cleaning up our fouled waterways, our parklands and our wilderness from rubbish and for recovering those valuable materials that go to waste.

I would also like to acknowledge my colleague in Victoria Colleen Hartland MLC, who I think today is reintroducing in the Victorian parliament her bill on container deposits because she shares the frustration of many people in this place that the Commonwealth has simply decided to bury a national container deposit scheme under endless reviews and analysis. Colleen my colleague in the Victorian parliament and her office have done an enormous amount of work in building support in Victoria for a state scheme. I still think that a national scheme is the right way to go and I suspect that industry would prefer a coherent set of regulations that applied across the country, but I really strongly commend Colleen Hartland MLC for bringing her bill forward to simply get on with the job of getting containers out of waterways and verges and into recycling centres where they belong.

One of the great benefits of a container deposit scheme is that it would mandate and fund the creation of a network of neighbourhood recycling centres. Once you get those up and running for beverage containers initially they become the drop-off point for batteries, fluorescent tubes and other objects that we might find intractable that simply end up in landfill.

I would again like to congratulate the Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water, for the constructive way in which he has approached this bill. It is always good to get an exposure draft of a bill so that you can see where a particular area is headed. I would like to thank all sides for the constructive spirit in which negotiations were entered into for this bill. It is a rare bit of good news. I would like to see this, very strictly speaking, as the first step of many. This simply sets us up with a framework which will be free to succeed or fail depending on the amount of effort and energy that is put into it. I look forward to discussing some of these matters in greater detail in the committee stage and indicate that the Greens are happy to support the bill.