Aussies have their own Great Wizard/Magician working on that one.
On an announcement more relevant to waste and this topic.
Quoted, “There are few issues that are raised more with me by kids, than plastics in the ocean,” the prime minister told reporters in Sydney on Tuesday.
Excuse the apparent contradiction with a recent response to children raising other environmental concerns.
Any small contribution must be welcome, although the Federal Govt has also been keen to blame the states for not doing enough.
Like so many major challenges to the environment and economy, it seems the greatest waste of all is the fighting between political opponents at all levels.
While they can regulate exports and also potentially impacts of water quality (inc. plastic in Australian controlled and international waters), their current responsibilities are highly restricted (one of the unfortunate aspects of the federation). The Commonwealth has little if any power to regulate the industry within Australia or to change the status quo.
The Commonwealth government can only take action where there is support through COAG or other intergovernmental agreements…which in the past has been challenging for those aspects which the States have responsibilities (think uniform road rules etc)…as the states are often reluctant to give up or dilute their powers
There is an enormous challenge to reach consensus between the Commonwealth and State Governments. I can see some States using support for (agreeing to) the Commonwealth’s approach as an opportunity for leverage in other areas (e.g. funding for flammable cladding in Victoria is a possibility). If this occurs it will be unfortunate as waste and its impacts extend beyond borders (bot state and international) and is not something that should be negotiated or be a bargaining tool.
Maybe the Commonwealth government could try and class waste (or recycling) under a similar umbrella to those which are currently classed as ‘matters of national environmental significance’. I expect that this would lead to high court challenges as this would set a precedence for the Commonwealth to call anything they like and currently responsibility of the States under the Constitution as ‘nationally significant’. It could be a pathway for a future Commonwealth government to in effect remove any state government functions.
I am not the one making it more complicated…it is the governmental system we live in and the legacy our ‘forefathers’ left for us in 1901.
Currently no one knows how to create effective behavioural change to ensure Australians recycle properly and minimising contamination.
While it may seem possible, unfortunately there are no technologies available which can remove all contaminants from recycled materials steams. There have been equipment developed based on ‘test materials’, but these have proven to be unsuccessful when scaled up for real waste streams (I recall in the 1990s, an Indian inventor developed a general waste storting facility and released videos showing its success using test materials. When real life waste was pushed through the same facility, it stopped sorting soon thereafter). There is a significant amount of engineering research being undertaken to find a solution…but there are insurmountable hurdles when a stream is highky inconsistent and contains any matter of contamination. There is good and proven technoligies to sort co-mingled, uncontaminated recycked streams, but when contaminants are added, the sorting systems become ineffective.
The governments could change the existing system could become more onerous to the community (e.g. all recyclables separated and taken to a special facility for individual materials like that is some small Japanese communities which have very high recycling rates) to try and reduce the level of contamination at the household and commercial premise gate …but there is a lot of evidence showing the more onerous, the less participation and more waste generated.
Could try say the Dutch systen where clean recyclables are collected and all remaining contaminated or general waste materials are burnt for energy or incinerated. This is a possible solution but would need both community attitudes to change, restructure of the existing industry and policy guideance by government. This in effect would be a reboot/reset of the status quo.
They could make waste and recycling adversarial where those who contaminate get penalties…but this will also cause less participation as one will recycle less to try and ensure that they don’t get such penalties.
At the end of the day, if Australians could recycle properly and not contaminate the recycled materials stream, we would not be having this discussion or have the existing problems. This is where the real issue lies and what needs to be overcome moving forward if Australia is serious about managing its waste and recyclables.
If we feed our garbage to one of these, it could dismantle the trash into component molecules, ready for reassembly into whatever we desire. Of course, the intellectual property implications of being able to dismantle a product, recording its structure down to the molecular level, might get interesting. Gives piracy a whole new dimension.
as well as the glass milk bottles being returned, washed and re-used; this also happened to the tall glass beer bottles. Raw material and energy efficient instead of “throw away mentality”
In the regions, it’s common for used tyres to be stockpiled on a bush block. Come the next bushfire, the firefighters just work around the blazing tyre pile. Trying to put it out is a waste of time.
Another article regarding recycling, or lack thereof, in Victoria where they still cannot agree to introduce a container deposit scheme.
The video clip of recyling in Wales has to be seen to be believed.
It involves multiple workers carrying containers from residences and sorting and placing the contents into various sections of the truck.
It is highly reminiscent of the local garbage trucks prior to the introduction of wheelie bins many years ago when the garbos would collect your galvanised steel bin and empty it into the back of the truck whilst removing beer bottles, soft drink bottles, aluminium cans, scrap metal and anything else of value, which they would store in crates along the side ot the trucks.
Highly labour intensive and good for reducing unemployment but it might result in a hefty rates increase.
I think I can hear Lonnie Donegan’s 1960 hit song “My Old Man’s A Dustman” playing in the background.
This is crazy and appears that the Victorian government hasn’t read independent and industry information on the principle reason for Victoria’s and industry problem. It is the contamination of the recycled materials stream through inappropriate recycling mainly in households (and some other sectors).
Having 6 bins means it will result in 6 potentially contaminated recycling bins instead of one. This is very poor government policy and appears to be seen doing something rather than solving the problem. It could make the problem worse.
While container deposit schemes may not significantly change recycling rates, a major advantage of the scheme is it produces a lower contamination in the specific recycling stream (even a high quality stream if consumers remove caps/lids prior to recycling). Individuals can’t place anything in the stream as barcodes are used to determine if a container is accepted or rejected. The Victorian government could expand out the program to include a wider range of products as a Australian ‘experiment’…such as wine bottles (so individual glass colours can be separated) and other common food packaging which is currently not covered in other state programs.
As outlined above, the lower the contamination the higher the value of the recycled materials stream and the higher demand by industry as a raw feed to supplement virgin material…Finding practicable strategies to prevent stream contamination (such as container deposit schemes) provide a solution…more bins doesn’t.
When I read the report about 6 bins my first mental question was eg. which bin does something made of plastic with a metal device embedded go into. Conclusion, probably landfill since the plastic bin would be contaminated by the metal and vice versa? Most of us will only go so far to try taking things apart.
There might be a few low key research projects around the world investigating new materials comprised of ‘all of the above’ as an approach to using contamination rather than rejecting it. I could imagine a rubber-plastic-metallic-glass particle board or brick being useful for something, as an example.
Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that recycling is a skilled occupation. Relying on the average householder to appropriately sort their refuse reliably fails (to varying degrees), so leave the sorting to trained operators.
That’s not going to come cheap, but we’ve seen with the NBN how trying to do things on the cheap works out. It comes down to how much we value our home planet.
How many plastic bottles does a household empty per month compared to how many smart speakers does a household purchase per month?
The above question is a simple one which highlights the need for corporations and governments to make stopping the manufacture of plastic bottles etc their top priority in the fight against plastic pollution.
The imbalance between the numbers of plastic items made versus the numbers of them that are (or will be) recycled is the reason.
A working recycling scheme? Where in Australia? Sorry but our recycling efforts are so poor that everywhere in the World would reject our collections due to contamination (except maybe just maybe waste to energy ones). Sure there are some successes but the issue is we are just bad at keeping our recycling streams “clean” of contamination so that most of these streams end up as land fill anyway or sent back to us when we try to ship it overseas.
Then we have the situation where it is sometimes so cheap to make new product than recycle it there is no market to recycle eg we as a Country store tonnes of glass because it is too expensive to recycle. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (or maybe glass in this situation).
