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

You know you are in trouble when you get called 'well intentioned'. That was when my heart sank. I thought perhaps there would be a last-minute change of heart. I would be delighted to work with coalition senators on definitions. Senator Fisher is correct that these are not terms of art—they are not defined in the bill. They are concepts that are very clearly understood in the industry, in the waste management sector in particular. If Senator Fisher feels that some definitions would improve the drafting, I would be more than happy to work up some language to make her happy.

I want to draw the chamber's attention back to when this issue was addressed by the committee as it was evaluating this bill. A number of organisations, particularly Keep Australia Beautiful New South Wales and the Total Environment Centre, raised significant concerns with explicitly men­tioning this. I suppose I have to disagree with both the comments of Senator Birmingham and the parliamentary secretary that these objectives are implied in the existing objects of the bill, because of course the existing objects of the bill refer principally to what happens at the end of life of the materials that we are discussing. They are silent, as they are on many other issues, on the implied consequences of creating new product streams, new resource streams, of material that we are capturing rather than simply throwing away.

For example, Keep Australia Beautiful New South Wales highlighted that one of the ongoing trends in the production of modern goods is their reducing life span. I addressed this in my speech on the second reading in the context of mobile phones. Quite an important part of the enormously increasing waste volumes that we are subject to and are trying to come to grips with here today is this concept of planned obsolescence, the throwaway or consumer society, where it is seen as a very good marketing strategy to get your customers to throw goods away so that they have to buy the new ones that you have produced. That is directly at odds with all sane objectives for creating a sustainable society. It would not matter so much if they were contemplating goods that were essentially biodegradable, completely harmless and made from recycled materials in the first place, but of course, in the instance of mobile phones and so on, that is absolutely not the case. Mobile phones are packed with toxic materials, valuable metals and so on that we would seek to recover. We would seek not to stockpile them in a warehouse but to reuse them. Keep Australia Beautiful New South Wales made the point very clearly that modern consumers will simply throw a product onto a kerb side for council to clean up and buy a brand-new one because the parts are too expensive or too difficult to find. We know in the field of consumer electronics in particular that things that are made these days are designed not to be repairable; when something goes wrong you are supposed to turf it. That is quite a troubling feature of our consumer society. Keep Australia Beautiful highlighted in their submission that when you produce any type of product, there is a set amount of energy and resources that are used and the longer the product is used, the better return on the embodied energy and input of resources. If you can make something last twice as long, its impact, its footprint if you will, is obviously half as heavy. They recommended that the objects of the act be amended to ensure that the lifespan of a product be considered for its impact on waste streams in the environment.

As you will see from the language that we have proposed, we did not quite go there. But we did simply want to insert a paragraph that acknowledges the importance of closing those loops. The Total Environment Centre, who have done an enormous amount of valuable advocacy on this issue over many years, argued more strongly for language that we effectively lifted and proposed—that is, that we should be making a contribution to reducing the amount of 'virgin resources used in products by preferencing recyclate'. It does not go as far as to raise the concerns that Senator Birmingham spoke of—that is, that various products streams will find themselves at odds with this object of the bill if all you were seeking to do, for example, is simply to remove hazardous waste for which you have no further use. It is a contribution to reducing the amount, and I do not think we would face the problem of particular product streams falling foul of the object of the bill when it is worded as generally as that.

The committee report says:

The TEC argued that in addition to the benefit of limiting the amount of new resources used in creating a product, expanding the objects of the Act would have the effect of encouraging the domestic recycling industry …

This is something that is tremendously important that is continually missed in the processes of doing the regulatory impact statements. TEC told the committee:

You create a market for the recyclate and that leads to very significant economic benefits. The fact is that for every tonne of waste that goes to landfill there is one job, but if you take it right through the whole processing and manufacturing system and include that recyclate in a product you create nine jobs.

That is modelling that the Total Environment Centre and some of their colleagues in the waste management industry have been promoting for many, many years—that is, it is more labour intensive but less capital intensive to simply close some of these product loops in the first place.

The committee noted those concerns and came to the view, as I think the minister has stated, that the objects of the bill, while silent in this particular aspect, imply that we should reduce the impact of these virgin resources and instead be preferencing recyclate, for both environmental reasons and sound economic reasons. If you can plug these materials back into product cycles, then again you have created an economic value for them that the market will see, will take note of and will overall reduce the footprint of material cycles. I invite the coalition, if they will, to sharpen the definitions of the materials that Senator Fisher observed are not terms addressed or acknowledged specifically in the bill, and I commend this amendment to the chamber.

Question negatived.