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

Today's debate is an important opportunity to talk about public health and the harmful impacts that tobacco has on consumers of these products, but I'd like to talk about the environmental impact of the tobacco industry today. I will perhaps start with a question to senators here: do they know what is the most common item of litter on the planet, by individual item? I've probably given a slight clue to that—it's cigarette butts. They are the most common item of litter on the planet. Estimates suggest that up to 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded into the environment every year. They are easily carried in stormwater run-off through drainage systems and eventually to local streams, rivers and waterways. Tobacco producer Philip Morris International acknowledges that it can take up to 15 years for a single cigarette butt to break down. During this process of degradation, thousands of plastic microfibres are created and released into the environment.

I remember when we had a groundbreaking Senate inquiry five or six years ago into marine plastics. The report was titled Toxic tide. We had a demonstration from a scientist, who had a glass of water filled with cigarette butts in various levels of decomposition.

They actually can look like little jellyfish. They have little plastic tendrils in them. People might think cigarette butts themselves don't have plastic in them, but they do. They have a lot of microplastic in them, so they're actually one of the most dangerous items of litter that we find on our beaches and in our oceans.

Believe me, I have done many beach clean-ups and other clean-ups in my time—too many to count, and I have picked up too many cigarette butts to count. So I would believe the current littering rates derived from these clean-ups, and, based on these rates and the average weight of a cigarette butt, it can be estimated that at least 350,000 tonnes of plastic tobacco filters end up in waterways globally each year. Personally, I think that's an underestimate. With 15 years of litter accumulating, up to 5.3 million tonnes of cigarette butts could currently be in Australia's waterways. According to WWF, up to nine billion plastic cigarette butts are discarded and washed into waterways in Australia each year. That's just in Australia. Each year, Clean Up Australia records butts as the single most reported litter item across Australia. In 2020, cigarette butts represented 16 per cent of all litter reported across the Clean Up Australia database around the country.

When littered into the environment, each butt can contaminate up to 40 litres of water. Significant threats that cigarettes pose to the Great Barrier Reef—as has been well noted by Tangaroa Blue and other groups that do fantastic work up there cleaning up plastic—include reduced water quality, marine debris and microplastics, to which cigarette butts are obviously a major contributor. So action on tackling environmental pollution from cigarettes will protect the health of both our people and planet.

The second reading amendment which I understand my excellent colleague Senator Steele-John has foreshadowed that the Greens will be moving asks the Senate and the government to support a ban on single-use plastic film and tear strips in tobacco packaging, which is another significant source of litter from the cigarette industry. It also seeks support to mandate the use of recycled and recyclable cardboard in cigarette packaging. These actions would go some way to tackling the impacts that tobacco products have on our environment, including our waterways, coastlines and oceans. If we look at an average of 25 cigarettes per pack, just under 720 million packs could be bought by Australian consumers annually. With these packs being covered in non-recyclable cardboard and plastic tear strips, they are, of course, totally unrecyclable and give the feeling of something nice and new when you open the cigarette pack. We need to have a solution to dealing with that single-use plastic. There's certainly no regulation around it at all at the moment.

I want to give a special shout-out to the environmental advocacy group No More Butts in the Senate today for all the great work that they do. While I'm on that page, I'd also like to give a shout-out to other groups like the Surfrider Foundation, who also coordinate fantastic beach clean-ups. So does the Sea Shepherd marine debris group. Every day and every weekend around the nation, there's a Sea Shepherd group out there doing clean-ups. I also acknowledge Take 3 for the Sea and a whole range of other fantastic groups that are doing the hard work and providing the data for us. No More Butts estimate that in Australia up to 355 million packs could be littered each and every year, with an additional 300 million ending up in landfill. Think of all that single-use plastic film and non-recyclable cardboard piling up. It truly boggles the mind.

So the fight to end cigarette butt pollution for good will continue, and that work is urgent. But we must take available steps when the opportunity arises, and this bill and the second reading amendment circulated by the Greens present us with an opportunity to progress action on this issue. Cigarette butts, plastic bags and single-use plastic bottles are the three most common types of rubbish found on the Great Barrier Reef. It's time to end the age of single-use plastics. We need to recycle waste in the first place, and this starts at the design phase of packaging. Designing out harmful materials like single-use plastic film and tear strips in cigarette packs, the research that's going into alternatives for cigarette butts, and ensuring cigarette cartons are recycled and recyclable are concrete actions that can be taken at the design stage to eliminate waste in the first place.

But of course, as with any other problematic plastic waste—and, believe me, we have a lot of it in this country—the corporations that actually create this waste then hand over the responsibility for that waste, once those products are sold, to retailers and then on to consumers. No corporation is going to fix this unless they have to.

That's another thing we have learnt from 20 years of failed product-stewardship schemes around packaging in this country. We see, when we look especially at single use plastic packaging, that we've had many aborted attempts, using industry-led volunteer schemes, to reduce that waste that have been a complete failure. The current Albanese government is dealing with this issue right now.

I do applaud the previous government for taking steps towards improving recycling in this country. But—because, of course, the Greens introduced a bill to do this, back in 2020—they wouldn't go so far as to actually mandate required standards for things like recyclable content and the elimination of problematic single-use plastics.

Single-use plastics aren't just problematic because we find them in our oceans, where they kill marine life and break down into trillions of pieces of microplastic—and we are finding microplastic in plankton in the Antarctic right now; it is all through our ecosystem. It's not just that that is the problem. Plastics are a problem because we're also exploring for petroleum products, which are used to make plastic. In fact, plastic is one of the biggest sinks for fossil fuels on this planet, and, as we've forecast a continued rise in plastic production and consumption, of course we're going to see continued efforts and pressures to explore for fossil fuels that we don't need. So there are many reasons we need to remove plastics.

Designing these products is really the key. I've been working on this for years. We had two Senate inquiries into it. The report of the second one, which was great, was called Never waste a crisis. That actually laid the foundation for the Greens' private member's bill—and also for the government's legislation, which is the first time in nearly 15 years that we've had some reform to the waste and recycling industry. Those two inquiries did a lot of work in looking at what we need do. To make it really simple: we need to force corporations to do this. I think most Australians would agree with having government step in and manage the externality—that is, something that is having an external effect—from the production of these products.

Apart from climate change, there is probably no bigger pollution issue on this planet than plastics in our environment. It really comes down to government saying to businesses: 'If you use plastic in your products, it needs to stay in what we call the circular economy. Waste should be eliminated. Things that are in your products should be recyclable.' It makes sense, on so many levels, to recycle these products or reuse them or repair them and so on—the whole waste hierarchy.

It concerns me—may I say, while I have the opportunity today—that there is a big push on around this nation, right now, to simply burn, to incinerate, plastics. We're seeing pressure on local and state governments and the federal government to encourage the use of incinerators. While those incinerators may be slightly higher up the waste hierarchy from landfill, they're not much higher. And, of course, they produce toxic chemicals, which go into the environment. Worse than that, they encourage the consumption and production of more plastic, more waste. Incineration of these kinds of waste products is not recycling; it is surrender to the exact business model that has failed us: letting corporations get away with producing this stuff without redesigning it.

We need to ensure a way forward for the recovery and treatment of existing plastic pollution and put in measured steps around design, awareness, waste management and source reduction, to prevent future mass pollution from occurring in terrestrial and marine environments. We have fantastic technologies out there now, and there are people trying to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or the plastic gyre in the Pacific Ocean, for example, and we can take a lot of this plastic out. But every day the ocean continues to get filled with plastic from new sources.

Plastic is considered both toxic and unnecessary. It should be phased out at an accelerated rate, with adherence globally and without interference from big business and big tobacco.

Here in Australia, one million tonnes of Australia's annual plastic consumption is single use. There is another reason that we want to get rid of single-use plastics. Go ask the recycling industry what that reason is, and they'll tell you: it contaminates their waste stream and makes it really difficult for them to sort and get products into recycling streams. They have a waste stream at the MRF level, where the sorting occurs. With the kerbside collection, the stuff is put in a truck and then dumped at these sorting areas. Single-use plastic contaminates their waste stream and makes it really difficult and inefficient for them to recycle products that should be recycled, because they're contaminated by these single-use plastics. So there's actually a cost reduction factor for the recycling industry here as well.

It is the same story for mandating the use of recycled and recyclable cardboard for the packaging of cigarettes and tobacco related products. Each year, Australia puts approximately 130,000 tonnes of plastic into the marine environment. Only we, in places like this, can do something about this. That is the conclusion that I've drawn after nearly 20 years working in this area—the last 11 years in this place and a decade prior to that cleaning beaches, working with NGOs on this issue. Governments have a critical role to play here. I know there are some people in this place who aren't big on regulation, but this issue is so pervasive and so difficult to tackle. We have the most important job: telling corporations what they can and can't produce based on the pollution and how we tackle that pollution. Just a reminder for senators: it is estimated that, by 2050, plastic in the ocean will outweigh the biomass of fish. Obviously this is not acceptable. I commend to the Senate the amendment that the Greens will move to the second reading of this legislation:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate:

(a) notes that:

(i) there are environmental, as well as public health, reasons to discourage the use of tobacco products,

(ii) cigarette butts are one of the three most common types of rubbish found in the Great Barrier Reef's marine environment, and

(iii) tobacco-related packaging products, like single-use plastic film and tear strips, pose a significant threat to the health of our oceans and waterways; and

(b) calls on the Government to:

(i) mandate the use of recycled and recyclable cardboard for retail cigarette packaging and cartons, and

(ii) ban the use of single-use plastic film and tear strips used in cigarette and tobacco-related product packaging".

I would love to have added cigarette butts to this. I did have a private member's bill to ban the 10 most common items of pollution that we find on our beaches. That did include cigarette butts. The EU did take some steps towards doing this but found that this is very difficult until we can find an alternative to cigarette butts. While I haven't included that in the second reading amendment, I would encourage the government to continue to put funds into research and development to assist the cooperative research centres and other avenues to make sure that we have alternative products and that corporations are forced by mandated regulations to redesign their products for end of life so they stay in a circular economy, they don't find their way into our oceans, they don't kill marine life and they don't litter our beaches.