Australia needs a new national plan to stomp out massive levels of plastic pollution, a government inquiry has found, with experts and advocates saying that previous approaches have failed to effectively slow down the amount of plastic entering our waterways.
Drowning In Waste, an inquiry into plastic pollution chaired by Labor MP Tony Zappia, found that the current National Plastics Plan is “a disjointed compilation of goals, disappointingly some of which were already completed prior to the plan being developed”.
Critics have pointed to the failed REDcycle scheme — where supermarkets were found hoarding thousands of tonnes of plastic waste they could not recycle — as an indicator of what’s broken in Australia’s approach to plastic recycling.
“A small voluntary scheme, artificially amplified by the supermarket and product sectors for greenwash marketing purposes and through use of labelling … lacked credible commitment to become mainstreamed and avoided use of the recovered material,” the Boomerang Alliance and Total Environment Centre told the report.
The director of Boomerang — an alliance that comprises more than 50 Australian environmental organisations — Jeff Angel, told Crikey that “wishy-washy voluntary programs over the past 20 years” have achieved “only minor or no improvements”.
“The reluctance by the Commonwealth has until recently been based on ideological and political grounds,” Angel said. “That is, industry did not like being regulated, wanting maximum freedom to operate and then blame the consumer for the problems.”
“Now, particularly after the collapse of the voluntary REDcycle scheme, there appears to be greater agreement among state and federal governments that regulation must occur.”
The Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) echoed these concerns, pointing out that Australians produce, on average, 59kg of plastic waste per person each year, and misleading supermarket packaging is making the problem worse.
“Australia generates more single-use plastic waste per person than almost every other country in the world”, spokesperson Cip Hamilton told Crikey.
The AMCS accused Australian supermarkets of knowingly engaging in greenwashing tactics, saying they were “particularly concerned with the use of ‘plant-based’ and ‘compostable plastics’”, as well as “single-use” labelling as a means of circumventing state and territory plastic bans.
“AMCS is looking for leadership by governments and corporations to reduce needless packaging, rather than swapping one problematic material to another,” Hamilton said.
Waste disposal company Cleanaway criticised the targets of the National Plastics Plan, telling the inquiry it was “inconceivable and completely unrealistic” that Australia would be able to “improve its recycling recovery performance by an additional 180% in over two years time” in order to achieve the goals set out in the plan.
“If the Australian government wants to encourage more investment in domestic recycled content, Cleanaway submits consideration being given to mandating Australian recycled content,” a spokesperson told Crikey.
Cleanaway says that creating rules that allow for the streamlining of the recycling process needs to be a focus of any government packaging regulation, including getting rid of packaging made from problematic materials.
“For example, plastic laminated paperboard is hard if not impossible to commercially recycle and inevitably ends up in landfill.”
The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water said in a statement that the Australian government is establishing mandatory obligations for industry to take responsibility for the packaging it places on the market, to be established in a new regulatory scheme under Commonwealth legislation.
