Let’s get serious with our waste

Member for Lowan Emma Kealy jumped out of the blocks in declaring her neck of the woods off limits as a dumping ground for metropolitan recycling waste.

It was a pre-emptive move and a clear indication that the growing amount of recycling waste across the country has more than started to play on minds.

What seems to be missing in how governments are dealing with the recycling quandary are profound ways to move forward and eliminate this issue from occurring in the future – without losing any of our consumer luxuries or our environmental credibility.

Our philosophical approach needs

For a start, we shouldn’t be considering recyclable material as simple landfill waste. We must consider it a resource and future asset.

This means we have to continue or start to efficiently sort and store this product.

If that has to happen in the regions in contained bunkers without risk of contamination then so be it – however the regions have every right to demand rent and-or economic reparations.

If we have too much of this material being produced to manage, we must stop the bulk of the least recyclable of materials,

adjusting. such as one-use petro-chemical plastics, from entering the market at their source.

This means some tough legislation and the promotion of appropriate replacement technology for throwaway products that have minimal long-term impact on the environment.

This can only be achieved with a clear understanding of the overall issue.

The State Government’s latest ban on lightweight one-use plastic bags, while making good sense, had a counter-intuitive aspect that suggested otherwise.

As well as long-life petro-chemical bags – proven wildlife destroyers – the ban also included environmentally friendly compostable starch bags ‘to avoid confusion’. What the hey?

The recycling process, which apart from anything else makes us feel good about being responsible consumers, could only have gained momentum with growing demand for waste products. This happened.

Yet similar to many markets, it was inevitable that production would eventually outstrip demand and this is the situation with which we are now confronted.

For a lack of all other alternatives, we could burn this waste asset, perhaps to power industry.

It sounds far from ideal but we have technology available to do this in such a way that the only emission can be carbon dioxide.

We all know that CO2, despite being a natural everyday gas, is the friend of global warming and this move would no doubt attract considerable opposition.

But if we did this, to be responsible as well as countering backlash, we could come up with more significant off-setting carbon-retention schemes – perhaps a massive ramping up of Landcare revegetation projects.

We’re at a pressure point and people need to have confidence in their household recycling diligence and recycling services and that their efforts are worth something.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael Mccormack assured everyone during a visit to Horsham last week that the Federal Government was exploring ways to tackle the waste-recycling dilemma.

“It starts with local governments and then state governments, but we’ve taken national leadership on this,” he said.

We hope so. This issue isn’t going away in a hurry.