Eager to start bottle clean-ups
Tasmania’s welcome container refund scheme is almost here, says Pip Kiernan
EVERY year, thousands of Tasmanians take to their streets, beaches, parks, bushlands and waterways under the banner of Clean Up Australia to remove littered and illegally dumped rubbish.
Unlike other states, Tasmania doesn’t yet have a container refund scheme (CRS) for beverage containers, and we see the results of this in what our Tasmanian volunteers report they are collecting.
High on this list are bottles and cans made from recyclable plastics, metals and glass – all of which are tradeable commodities if captured before they end up in our precious environment.
We congratulate the Tasmanian government for its decision to introduce a CRS by 2022.
We know that putting a value on these items works, decreasing the amount of litter in the environment and providing access for the community through which they can redeem their deposit.
The government has also made the right decision with the type of scheme it has chosen.
The best-practice splitgovernance model relies on separating the co-ordinator of the scheme, which administers and reports on it, and the network operator, which collects the containers and provides the refund to the consumer.
The operator has an incentive to maximise the return of bottles and cans (they earn a fee to do that), resulting in more collection points in places where we work, play and live, that are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The parties involved in delivering this model will be decided by a transparent public tender process.
In just over four years, the split-governance model used in NSW has collected just under six billion containers for recycling. This model delivers the best outcome for the community and the environment.
Yet in Tasmania we have the big beverage companies, Coca-Cola and Lion, lobbying hard under the misleadingly named TasRecycle to control an alternative single-operator scheme putting them in charge.
Beverage giants CocaCola and Lion are the very ones that didn’t want a CRS! These companies spent years opposing cash-for-cans schemes in Australia.
Now that a scheme in Tasmania is inevitable, they are using the same tactics to convince us we can trust them with its management and operation.
It is clear the governance of any scheme for the state of Tasmania should not be under the control of a single entity with too much industry influence.
Rather, there should be a distance between refund network operator/s and the scheme co-ordinator.
This split-governance model guards against conflict of interest, whereas a singlescheme model entrenches it.
Tasmanians have waited a long time for their container refund scheme and deserve the model that best serves them and the environment.
Clean Up Australia and many others from the broader community have campaigned for decades to get a CRS in Tasmania and other states.
Let’s not fail Tasmanians and the environment at the final leg of getting this up and running.
Pip Kiernan
Chair, Clean Up Australia