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

The first point I wanted to make about this matter of public interest that I thought was interesting was Senator McKenzie talking about roads deteriorating and becoming potholed due to floods and rain events. Just before Christmas, I drove across Victoria and South Australia and the Nullarbor. I must admit, it was just post the very significant floods in Victoria. Yes, the roads were terrible and there were roadworks everywhere. It's also what I experienced in northern Queensland after record rains up there this year. The first point I wanted to acknowledge is that climate change has a very big impact on infrastructure and will continue to have a very big impact on infrastructure.

The second point I want to make today, in my very brief time, is about the circular economy. I've been pinging away at various estimates, in recent years, to Austroads and Infrastructure Australia asking when the government will step up and start procuring recycled content for use in roads. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year at local, state and federal government levels on roads. While probably not the highest-value use for recycled product, they certainly do provide a home for recycled products. If the government were to buy recycled products for our roads, we would create a market for the recycling industry, which is telling us it can take soft plastics—for example, in the REDCycle scheme—but the reason it hasn't been taking them and recycling them is no-one's buying them. No-one's buying the product they're creating.

I'll give you this is an example, which I put to Infrastructure Australia recently. Sustainability Victoria's website has put up one particular project as a case study. Downer Group's soft plastic asphalt road in Craigieburn, in Melbourne's north. As a metric, they talked about recycled content breakdown. Every one kilometre of road, which is two lanes, is paved with plastic and glass modified asphalt. It uses approximately—this is one kilometre—530,000 recycled plastic bags, 170,000 recycled glass bottles, 12,500 used printer cartridges and 130 tonnes of reclaimed asphalt. How's that! That's for one kilometre of road.

Now, if we're building thousands of kilometres of road every year and we can use these products, why wouldn't we create a circular economy? If the government steps in and provides a market for the recycling industry, it will give the industry the confidence it needs to invest in upgrading and we can actually take these soft plastics from our supermarkets for our recycling systems kerb side et cetera and we actually have a ready market for it. That's circular economy thinking.

Anyway, the Greens have been pinging away on this for some time. We are starting to see more interest from Infrastructure Australia. I just wanted to put it on the Senate's table today because I think it's a very exciting opportunity.