Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

And yours, Senator Hanson-Young. I visited the recyclers of South Australia—a very profitable group of small businesses, may I say, who make money out of recycling. They've set up these super-depots where you take in your cans and bottles for your refund and they treat you like customers. They say: 'What else have you got that we could recycle? Give us your batteries; give us your e-waste; give us your tyres'—that kind of stuff. Batteries are a perfect example of a product that can be almost completely reprocessed. In other words, they can be reused to make other batteries.

A lot of the photovoltaic systems we use at the moment are fairly new, but we know, given the redundancy and the life span of a lot of these products, that we're going to be facing a situation in five, 10 or 20 years where these systems will be replaced and we're going to need the silicon and other materials in them to be recycled. What a great idea. You buy your photovoltaic system and you may not notice that, when you pay $3,000 or $4,000 for a home system, you pay an extra $100 on the price, and get the 100 bucks back when you take your photovoltaic systems in to be reprocessed or recycled. The retailer plays a role and the producer plays a role, as does the consumer. Once again, it's a classic product stewardship scheme. I already talked about e-waste, which is part of it, and oil in plastic containers.

So there we have some examples of waste schemes that we need governments to play a role in. Governments need to legislate for these things, they need an advisory committee and, I would say, they need a leadership group to make sure that this happens. That's why I'm so disappointed that we're looking at scrapping the product stewardship scheme, because, of those waste varieties that I mention here, only e-waste has been properly designed, legislated and made mandatory, and it's been highly successful. The other schemes have suffered from a lack of leadership, a lack of resources and funding, a lack of research and, seriously, a lack of commitment. We're close to getting state based schemes for bottles and cans. That is really important to me, because CSIRO did the world's first study of plastics on beaches around the entire country. They did transects at every beach. It would have been a great job; it took them two years. They went to every beach around the country and did transects and collected plastic waste. They found that, by volume, more than half the waste on our beaches around the country comes from plastic bottles. Plastic bottles float, especially when they've got their caps on. Senator Moore sat in on the inquiry. She's been a champion of this issue as well. It's low-hanging fruit: we can remove those bottles from the product waste scheme by making them valuable. I know Senator Paterson understands economics—as I think other senators in here do as well—and something's not waste, rubbish or litter anymore if you put a value on it. If you put a value on something, it's worth something. It may not be worth the utility that I have to pick it up, but someone out there—a scouts group or a homeless person, as often happens to be the case in South Australia, or other groups of people—will find utility in picking up this rubbish and taking it to be recycled.

These schemes work really well by using a simple market based price mechanism, and we know that's why South Australia is so successful, because it can appeal to every kid, as was the case when I was growing up. Every time you saw a bottle or can by the side of the road, it was like seeing a Willy Wonka chocolate bar gold wrapper because it meant 10c. Back then it was only 5c, but you only needed two to buy yourself a 'freezer', as we called them back then. I don't know if anyone remembers freezers? They were 12c and they were like ice creams. Or you could buy a Red Skin or a raspberry Split—do you remember? Maybe Senator Abetz would remember raspberry Splits. You used to go to the beach, Senator Abetz—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President. These things were all able to be bought by collecting a few bottles and cans that some yobbo had thrown out their window. You could take them in and get them recycled. The system works really well.