Sustainability has been the mantra of the times, with consumers turning to ethical fashion, reusable food packaging and green energy to do their part to tackle climate change.
But the pandemic has thrown much of those efforts into disarray. Not only has online spending on fashion, beauty and household goods soared, but the construction boom is generating tens of millions of tonnes of masonry debris, and safety measures — from plastic-laden face masks to disposable coffee cups — have fuelled Australia’s rubbish crisis.
In this three-part series, Crikey will explore how the pandemic has created an explosion of rubbish — and what we can do about it.
Where’s all the waste coming from?
The pandemic put a pause on reusable supermarket bags, trendy keep cups and second-hand markets. After decades of campaigns to change our behaviour, we’ve reverted to bad habits to follow health and safety advice.
But as the pandemic eases, there are concerns the bad habits might be here to stay. Although household waste had steadily decreased over the past 15 years, a report from Infrastructure Australia found there had been a 20% increase across 2020.
The latest national figures show that in 2018-19, Australia generated an estimated 74.1 million tonnes of total waste or 2.94 tonnes each person, an increase from 2.7 tonnes in 2014-15. Most of this came from construction waste, followed by organics, ash and hazardous waste. There were 2.5 million tonnes of plastic waste produced that year.
After surges in online shopping, a construction boom and reliance on takeaway across the pandemic, those figures are likely to rise. Globally the pandemic has created more than 8 million tonnes of extra plastic waste. More than three-quarters of that comes from hospital waste –personal protective equipment including face masks, gloves, and face shields — followed by online-shopping packaging.
Standard at-home rapid antigen tests have 10 grams product — just four grams of which are the actual test. The rest is made up of non-recyclable plastic. Sterility is necessary for the test, but it shows how much plastic COVID-19-related medical items generate.
Some of Victoria’s aged care facilities in Melbourne’s 2020 winter outbreak reported a 100-fold increase in clinical waste, with some filling 12 240-litre bins a day rather than the usual one bin a week.
How have our habits changed?
Associate professor of marketing at Melbourne University Daiane Scaraboto tells Crikey it was tough for many consumers to switch to single-use plastic.
“There were certain things we could no longer avoid, like disposable masks (before cloth ones were readily available) or plastic grocery bags from supermarket delivery,” she said.
“Habits form very quickly, and we get used to the convenience of things being simple and easy. It’s a whole new process to make an additional effort — to remember to wash and bring your reusable bags, to bring your own containers to restaurants.”
But many Australians have an eco-conscious mindset. Cafes and restaurants initially turned to plastics they could get cheaply and quickly, but many soon turned to compostable containers following consumer demand, Scaraboto said.
This has been fuelled by Australia’s 2025 national packaging targets to use 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging. In 2018-19, 11,000 tonnes of packaging in Australia was certified compostable plastic. About 90% comes from festivals and community events.
But while restaurants might be paying attention, food manufacturers aren’t. One World Wildlife Fund Australia survey found in 2021 just 16% of popular supermarket food products came in containers that could be recycled at home; another 55% had to be taken to a collection point.
Recyclable plastic also isn’t being recycled correctly, Clean Up Australia chairman Pip Kiernan says. In an average home recycling bin in 2018-19, 13% of materials were contaminated — consisting of non-recyclable items.
This, Kiernan says, is called “wish cycling: things we think should be able to be recycled, we put in the wrong bin and can lead to extra items being lost to landfill”.
Where’s all this ending up?
Globally across the pandemic an estimated 25,900 tonnes of plastic ended up in oceans.
“Our volunteers are seeing more pandemic waste in the environment,” Kiernan said, a lot of which was disposable face masks.
But she says many younger Australians are looking for sustainable solutions: at the start of 2020, more than 10 million keep cups had been sold around the world.
Kiernan says it is important for consumers to do their research. The Good On You app rates brands based on sustainability and ethical production, and shoppers should focus on brands that use recyclable or compostable packaging.
Purchasing new items isn’t the most sustainable way of living, no matter how green an item seems. Buying second-hand and reusing is, she says.
Thursday: how the building boom has changed the waste crisis.
Have you quietly stopped doing the right thing during the pandemic? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Its simply because of a No Brains Government. The fundamentals are simple.
Recyclable items should be recycled. NO exceptions.
Only recyclable packaging etc. should be used.
Governments should manage the operation.
Any of your negative responses should start with Can Do Capitalism can’t do. So step aside and elect a Government that will do.
How simple is that?
PS Yes I can fill pages with instructions and details but I am not writing the article.
Agreed.
If waste (especially plastic and other environmentally damaging materials) was taxed appropriately, i.e. to cover the long term damage and rehabilitation costs, then companies wouldn’t use it.
It’s called cost externalisation. If the true costs of goods and services was built into pricing, basically the downstream costs of environmental and social damage, we would pay at least 30% more for everything. Do we really want any government doing rehab? It doesn’t work in the mining industry.
Externalising costs is like the ‘tragedy of the commons’ – a fallacy based on wildly uneven power – aka privatise profit, socialise costs.
This is a really important article Amber. I’m surprised the environmental costs of keeping us ‘safe’ from Covid are not garnering more attention.
As early as April 2020 lockdown I began noticing a lot of discarded masks on footpaths, gutters and parks while out on daily exercise. While the impacts are less visible, every PCR test involves a plethora of non-recyclable plastic and materials, and we carry out millions every single day across the globe.
But now that RATs are becoming a frontline tool in our COVID response and production is scaling up to meet global demand, the amount of waste will ramp up to mind-boggling levels. Particularly when public health regulations will require large cohorts to use RATs every day as a precondition of workplace or school attendance, much less the staggering numbers of the broader population who will rely on them to self-regulate their social interactions.
And every RAT sees an assortment of non-recyclable plastic (and in some obscene instances, a single-use disposable UV flashlight) ending up in landfill or in our waterways. Conservatively we’re looking at multiple millions of these things every day.
I don’t think enough people comprehend the inextricable link between public and environmental health. It’s the latter that is far more likely to cause our demise.
It is painful for the well meaning to acknowledge but recycling just does not happen when raw material is cheaper – it’s about profit, not ecology.
Craig Reucassel, in the ABC’s War on Waste series, put trackers in recycling material and then followed them to the landfill.
Like airport passenger screening, it is theatre as a sop to the bien pesants and worse than ineffective – it is seriously deleterious because it does not stop them buying so much crap if they think that it is recycled.
If the virus don’t get us, the waste will.
No amount of such ostentatious, token reductions by concerned Australians will “do their part to tackle climate change.” The 6-8 t/a of CO2 we each dump in the air is far more threatening than the 2.94 t/a of solid waste we bury underground. Serious action requires each of us to vote, and vote for candidates promising momentum to 100% reduction by 2050. It should be the top reason to select a candidate, even if he or she is the only one available saying “100%” and “immediate momentum”, or its equivalent.