Recycling bins are being dumped into landfill across the country. Melbourne’s recycling stockpiles continue to burst into flames. And this week, an investigation by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed Indonesia is returning 13 tonnes of stinking, sludgy and maggot-infested plastic waste to recycling company Visy in Melbourne due to toxic contamination.
Yet Australians continue to sort out their rubbish and recyclables, dutifully wheeling their commingled yellow bins out to the curb. And for what?
Recycling has been around in Australia for over a century. Rags in 1815 were used to make paper, scrap metals have been reused since 1915, and plastics have been recycled since the ‘70s. We’ve had decades to learn how to do it right, so what on earth has gone wrong?
Where does our recycling go?
Australia has become increasingly reliant on exporting our recyclables overseas, shipping our plastic troubles out of sight and out of mind.
Here’s how it works. Local councils pick up kerbside bins through a collection contract with a material recovery facility. They then sort the different recyclable materials into individual bale types, which are generally sold or traded to remanufacturing facilities. In the case of plastic, most are shipped abroad where the recyclables are melted down into pellets and resold to Australia to manufacture new products.
According to the latest government data, Australia exported about 3.12 million tonnes of waste between April 2018-19. Our waste is mostly shipped to Thailand, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, China and Indonesia.
Our recycling crisis began early last year when China changed the rules on what it would take. It now only accepts material with less than 0.5% contamination, ruling out 99% of the recycling Australia previously sold it.
Malaysia and Indonesia have followed suit in tightening restrictions. Indonesia now inspects all paper products it receives, while Malaysia frequently sends back shipments which don’t meet their contamination requirements.
Deakin University hazardous materials management expert Dr Trevor Thornton says recent rejections of Australian waste sends a message.
“We’ve had this head in the sand mentality, where if China’s stopped taking it, oh, then Indonesia will,” he says.
But given these countries are now refusing our contaminated waste, “this [is] something we can’t do”.
Do we really have ‘toxic’ plastics?
The stinking recycling bale rejected by Indonesian customs contained B3 waste, categorised as “hazardous and/or toxic materials” that could “damage and/or pollute living environment and/or can harm human’s health”.
But how toxic was it?
According to Gayle Sloan from the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia (WMRR), not at all.
“I don’t believe for a second that it’s toxic, I believe it has more contamination than agreed upon,” she says.
If contamination (the presence of materials other than those specified) is higher than 2% Australia deems the container hazardous, Sloan explains. A huge contributing factor is that most products contain a vast array of different plastics and materials.
“10% of a water bottle is the paper label. The lid is a different plastic. The bottom of a yoghurt pot has polypropylene — the lid has metal. Those are contaminants,” Sloan says.
In April alone, Australia exported about 452,200 tonnes of waste, with a value of $559 million. To combat both the contamination and the sheer volume of waste, Sloan says consumers needed to make better purchasing choices, as well as be smarter about how they recycle at home.
“We need to educate households about what goes in the bin and how”.
This includes encouraging Australians to clean out their recycling before putting it in the bin.
“Indonesia only accepts things that are empty and dry — throwing out a full sauce bottle is a contaminant,” Sloan says.
Why don’t we recycle here?
China’s change in policy highlighted the fact that Australia’s capacity to remanufacture our own waste is still 1.2 million tonnes per year short of where it should be. But if we could make up this gap it would represent a huge boost to the economy.The recycling industry, according to WMRR, generates 9.2 jobs for every 10,000 tonnes of material recycled — four times the amount generated from landfill.
Despite this huge advantage, Australia hasn’t got the remanufacturing infrastructure — and according to Sloan that won’t change anytime soon as the country lacks the economy of scale.
“There are no market signals of ‘you must build it,” she says, adding that part of the problem is that recycling often isn’t very economical.
“The price of virgin (non-recycled) plastics are based on supply and demand, with virgin PET prices fluctuating because it is oil-related.”
Prices aren’t mandated, meaning recycled products can often end up being more expensive than their virgin counterparts.
“We need market demands and levers pulled to help drive that,” she says, stressing the need for government recycling incentives, such as bottle collection schemes or bonuses provided for companies which use recycled materials.
Why is Australia in the middle of a recycling crisis?
Because we have been told, and now tell ourselves, that all we have to do is put it in the recycling bin each fortnight and the planet is saved. Where the bin’s contents then go is out of our sight so out of mind.
“To combat both the contamination and the sheer volume of waste, Sloan says consumers needed to make better purchasing choices, as well as be smarter about how they recycle at home.”
“[T]he sheer volume of waste”. I am very diligent about refusing excess packaging, recycling a small number of plastic bags when I buy fruit and veg, carrying cloth bags. But try buying cup hooks or hearing aid batteries without getting any finger-breaking plastic packaging. And then there’s the pharmacy stuff – eye drops in individual plastic packages within tinfoil wraps within a cardboard box.
“[M]aking better purchasing choices – with companies such as Coles, Woolworths and Aldi? Ya dreamin’! Try buying meat or fish without getting one-use, hard plastic containers. Or deli items without each one being individually wrapped. Ask for less packaging and staff look at you as if you have just let fly with a string of obscenities.
Smarter about recycling at home? We need to be better informed. My recycling bin must be close to twenty years old and the information inside the lid is correspondingly outdated. Local government sends glossy brochures each month which offer no new information and simply add to the recycling problem.
I learned a huge amount from watching Craig Reucassel’s programs on ABC TV. This article – not so much.
The kicker in War on Waste was his simply putting a tracker into “recycling” material – guess where it ended up.
Thankfully South Australia does the right thing & recycles here in the State. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation still bitches & moans about the idea of putting a deposit on cans & bottles…..
Dang, no market signals that Australia should re-make it’s waste here! Wow, if only there was $50-60m to invest in R&D for local re-making, and maybe another $100m as seed money for those able to operationalise the output of the R&D, and perhaps a $25-30m bucket for education on how to responsibly recycle. But, as we know, there isn’t a spare $195m sloshing around unspent to put to a good cause and job creator, well, not now anyway.
Why do people agonize over recycling? The simplest and safest solution is to immediately bury all our waste underground rather than fuss about dealing with it on the surface. Recycling may feel good at the individual level but as far as society is concerned, it only prolongs the point at which the original waste is eventually buried.
Your solution sounds simple but not safe, so I’m inclined to rubbish it.
?
Because successive throw-away governments, for decades, have elected to not spend time in the present, preferring instead to move our problems on to the future for someone else to solve? To “save money now” by not spending the readies to deal with the detritus of a modern society?
Rather than addressing our present self-made problem, relying instead on :-
Plan A) pile it up and send it off-shore – to smother and pollute some once emerging third world country or two?
And when that reached capacity,
Plan B) “Let it pile up, then bury it for future generations here to deal with” – when it would be much more expensive (monetarily and environmentally) to deal with?
They’d call it their “legacy”? …… Maybe?
Maybe not – maybe future generations will call it their “something else”?