Government Backflip Means Polluters Not Held To Account: Greens

Recycled plastic bottles at the Northern Adelaide Waste Management Authority's recycling site in Edinburgh, near Adelaide, on April 17, 2019. (Brenton Edwards/AFP via Getty Images)

The Australian Greens are decrying the federal government’s decision to allow a temporary reprieval on shipping plastic overseas to be recycled.

This comes after it was revealed on May 18 that the Minister for the Environment, Tanya Plibersek, had given temporary approval for recycling company Oately Resources Australia to export some of Australia’s most easily recyclable household plastic waste, which includes milk cartons, vegetable oil containers, and soft drink bottles, for one year.

Previously, Australia sent much of its plastic waste overseas to China for recycling, but this stopped in 2018 when China stopped accepting solid waste.

The former Morrison-led Coalition government then instituted a staged export ban on plastic in 2020, which banned mixed plastic waste from mid-2021 and placed stronger restrictions on sorted plastic waste from the middle of 2022.

Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, the party’s spokesperson for waste and recycling, said that the minister’s decision to backflip on exporting plastic is a backstep, allowing plastic producers to get away with not cleaning the mess they make.

“An export ban on sending plastics overseas for recycling should have signalled a welcome boost for Australia’s recycling industry—particularly for procurement processes—but successive governments have failed to take simple but critical steps to make us self-sufficient waste and recycling managers,” he said.

“Plastic producers need to clean up their act and take responsibility for the mess they make, and governments need to enforce this through laws and binding regulations. There is nothing complicated about this, it should have been fixed years ago.

“We’ve had six years to come up with a plan to deal with our waste problem. But no government has been brave enough to deal with the elephant in the room, which is regulating plastic packaging in this country.”

However, Plibersek told ABC that the reprieve was granted to alleviate a stockpiling issue.

“The exemption was granted to make sure it is recycled and does not end up in landfill,” she said.

Recycling Companies Want Mandatory National Packaging Targets

Whish-Wilson said that the recycling sector had called on the federal government to institute legally binding and mandatory national packaging targets so they could have “the confidence to invest in upgrading the infrastructure necessary to process plastic and other waste.”

“The system is broken,” Whish-Wilson said. “People’s trust has been broken. The Albanese Government must regulate Australia’s plastic packaging industry now.”

The Greens have previously attempted to introduce legislation that would have mandated national packaging targets in 2020 with an amendment to the Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020. However, the amendment did not pass.

Government Determined to Create Domestic Recycling

The comments from the Greens come after Plibersek said that the federal government was investing around a quarter of a billion dollars in expanding and upgrading the country’s recycling facilities, part of which includes a $60 million investment as part of the Recycling Modernisation Fund (RMF).

The funds will be provided over four years, from 2022-2023, and will be invested in state-of-the-art advanced recycling solutions for hard-to-recycle plastics and address low plastics recycling rates.

However, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water has yet to announce any development on how the funds will be used.

“We’re determined to make sure we’ve got the facilities on the ground,” Plibersek said. “Right now, we’re building or upgrading 48 facilities around Australia, 11 of those have already opened, and that’s how we deal with the recycling issue in Australia.”

Plibersek said the federal government is working with state and territory leaders to make sure that Australia has a circular economy by 2030.

“We’re investing to make sure that that happens,” she said.

“And I very much say to, mums and dads, kids, who are collecting their bottles and cans for recycling, please keep doing it because facilities are being built, and we need to get better as a country at using less raw material in the first place, recycling more of what we use.”