Environment One year on: where is Australia's recycling going now?
Recycling is being stockpiled and council authorities fear it will soon head to landfill, as Australia’s recycling crisis continues to take its toll on the industry.
More than a year after China refused to accept 99% of the world’s recycling, halting the export of more than one million tonnes of Australian waste each year, the heads of local government warn the recycling market is still in trouble.
On 1 January 2018, China’s National Sword policy forced Australia to rethink its decade-long reliance on exporting thousands of tonnes of plastic, paper and cardboard.
While the obvious solution would be to better develop the domestic recycling industry, councils say a lack of funding, coupled with rock-bottom recycling prices, is hampering efforts to build better infrastructure and reinvigorate a dying market.
A system still in crisis
“New South Wales urgently needs a big investment of funding from the waste levy to begin the process of growing a domestic recycling industry,” says the local government NSW president, Linda Scott.
“There are a number of councils that are having to stockpile materials that can be recycled so that it doesn’t get sent to landfill,” Scott says.
“In the face of the China [national] sword decision, recycling in NSW is at risk and will begin to falter.”
While council associations and industry claim recycling is yet to spill into landfill, local government authority heads across the nation are all calling for funding injections to deal with the crisis.
“You can only recycle something or a product if there is a market for it. If there is no market for it, then of course you have to send it to landfill,” says Tony Khoury, the executive director of the waste contractors and recyclers association of NSW.
China’s new 0.5% contamination threshold for recycling caused a glut of plastics and other recyclables in Australia as the nation’s facilities, which were already poor at sorting material, failed to meet the new standard.
The resulting sudden surplus, combined with limited domestic market capability, crashed the value of discarded plastic and paper.
According to a sustainable packing industry report, mixed paper scrap plummeted from $124/tonne to $0/ tonne, plunging councils into war with commercial operators whose product was suddenly worthless.
In April, Queensland’s Ipswich council threatened to send recycling to landfill, claiming that its recycling costs had quintupled to well over $2m in the wake of China’s new policy.
Last week the ACT government ordered 250 tonnes of recyclables to be dumped in landfill after the forced shutdown of a Hume recycling processing centre because of safety concerns.
In 2017, it was revealed that waste recycling companies were stockpiling glass after the cost of creating bottles in Australia became more expensive than importing the product from overseas.
But stockpiling paper and plastic is a much more dangerous game.
In July last year, stockpiled recycling bales in suburban Melbourne caught fire, causing evacuations and prompting inspections that uncovered more stockpiles across Victoria, according to Victoria’s environment protection authority .
“Urgent action is needed as ministers themselves have acknowledged,” says the Australian local government association president, mayor David O’Loughlin.
While the NSW environment minister, Gabrielle Upton, did not answer specific questions about investing more of the state’s waste levy into recycling, her office issued a statement saying the state government diverted $47m to help industry respond to China’s new policy in March last year.
“The NSW government has taken the lead by establishing an intergovernmental taskforce to progress a longer term strategic response to National Sword, in partnership with industry and local councils,” the statement, attributed to the NSW EPA, said.
“Waste Less, Recycle More is funded through the waste levy and is Australia’s largest waste and recycling funding program.”
In February, Victoria provided $13m to councils to help fund recycling until rates can rise in June. The government also injected $24m to improve processes.
In Tasmania, the chief executive officer of the Local Government Association, Dion Lester, says they have requested financial support from the state government to lessen the burden of the increased costs on the Tasmanian community.
“However, unlike most mainland jurisdictions, the Tasmanian government has not made any resources available,” Lester says.
So where does it go?
Recycling management has always been funded by levies and state and territory grants. But what exactly happens to Australia’s discarded plastic, paper, card, metal and glass once it’s emptied from yellow bins depends on the postcode.
Some councils contract waste disposal to private operators, called material recovery facilities (MRFs), while others run their own processing facilities and re-sale/collection shops.
Some states, such as Western Australia, have been sending almost all their recyclables to south-east Asian countries including Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Shifting the waste crisis elsewhere is a temporary solution already posing problems, with Malaysia banning plastic waste importing in October last year.
In Victoria, the chief executive officer of the Victorian Local Governance Association, Kathryn Arndt, labelled the current model of exporting waste overseas flawed and unsustainable.
“Perth has managed to avoid the eastern states catastrophe of no markets, nowhere to go. And with that said, Perth is focusing on local reprocessing capacity,” says the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia WA president, Adam Johnson.
“The thing that will resolve the issue is support from the state government.”
Johnson says on the east coast, recycling is being stockpiled while people are “frantically” working out how to move materials.
High-quality recycling in South Australia has allowed some recycling to still be sent to China.
Khoury says the first thing that followed China’s National Sword policy was that recyclers needed more money to clean up products, leading to standoffs between councils and processers.
“So there have been many, many negotiations in the past 12 months and many of them haven’t been finalised,” Khoury says. “There needs to be more input from the state and territory governments because they are the ones that collected the tax.”
‘As much backbone as in the average plastic shopping bag’
In December, Australia’s environment ministers agreed to a new national waste policy, which O’Loughlin says is full of good intentions but has “as much backbone as you’ll find in the average plastic shopping bag”.
The federal environment minister, Melissa Price, would not answer specific questions on the recycling crisis but instead issued a blanket statement that said: “The plan will include a coordinated approach to waste levies. It will also address waste management priorities including plastic pollution, support for industry development, increasing demand for recycled materials, and national approaches to waste policy and regulation, for example in regard to cross-border transportation of waste.”
Price said the government is considering converting power stations to burn plastic waste and create energy.
Urgent action is needed as ministers themselves have acknowledged Mayor David O’Loughlin, Australian local government association