PM lays down law with ban on waste exports

PRIME Minister Scott Morrison has vowed to ban waste exports, including plastics, paper, glass and tyres, in a bid to protect the world’s oceans.

A deal clinched between Mr Morrison and state and territory leaders will establish a timeline to ban all exports of domestic recyclables.

The breakthrough comes as recycling services have been thrown into disarray after developing nations, including China, banned or massively scaled back the amount of their scrap plastic imports.

Speaking after a Council of Australian Governments meeting yesterday, Mr Morrison said there would be no export of plastics, paper and glass to other countries “where it runs the risk of floating around in our oceans”.

“I don’t think there is a community you’ll walk into today, or a young child you speak to, who won’t tell you about the problem of plastics going through our waterways, ending up in our oceans or landfill,” Mr Morrison said.

“People think it’s going to be recycled but only about 12 per cent of it is.

“This stuff won’t change unless you say ‘there’s going to be a point in time where you’re not going to be able to put this stuff in a ship and send it off to someone else’.”

Australia exported nearly 4.5 million tonnes of waste last year with the vast majority of it going to Vietnam, Indonesia and China. It cost $2.8 billion to send all this waste overseas.

State and federal environment ministers will now work together to come up with a plan to end the exports.

Mr Morrison said he wanted the ban in place “as soon as is practicable”.

The leaders yesterday agreed the plan must reduce the amount of waste going into landfill and boost the recycling industry’s ability to collect, reuse, convert and recover waste.

Mr Morrison said the changes would create jobs in the local recycling industry.

“There is the work on the science but there is also the work on the economics, because we want to see this introduced as an opportunity,” he said.

The head of the Australian Local Government Association, Prospect Mayor David O’Loughlin, said councils had been waiting for national leadership on the issue.

“We’ve got households right across the nation who do their best to make sure they sort their waste out at home,” he said. “Their confidence of late has been dented when they found out that their recycling hasn’t been recycled as well as hoped.”