Government, the public, and businesses need to work together to turn WA’s poor recycling record around.
Curtin University sustainability professor Peter Newman believes the current climate offers an opportunity for the business sector to recycle Western Australia’s patchy record on waste.
Professor Newman, who has researched recycling for the past 40 years, said government incentives, low interest rates and demand for processing facilities were creating opportunities for businesses to enter the recycling sector.
“Entrepreneurs who have good ideas about how to deal with recycling, this is their big chance,” Professor Newman said.
He said the public was looking for local jobs as well as opportunities to contribute on environmental issues, while the government was grappling with climate strategies and issues around landfill.
(click here to view a PDF version of this special report)
Professor Newman told Business News investment in recycling should be considered the next part of the COVID-19 recovery.
“It’s no longer a wild west economy where you just chuck things out, you have to do it properly,” he said.
In March, the national cabinet announced bans on exporting unprocessed plastic, paper, glass, and tyre waste.
The bans will be introduced gradually, with unprocessed glass exports banned from January 1 2021, through to the paper ban from July 1 2024.
To improve waste infrastructure in light of the bans, and ensure waste can be processed onshore, the federal government invested $190 million in its Recycling Modernisation Fund.
In July, the WA government committed $15 million to increase capacity for local processing of waste plastic and tyres.
South Metropolitan Regional Council chief executive Tim Youé said all materials collected in people’s recycling (yellow lid) bins, except for glass, were currently exported, and there was a real need for local processing facilities.
“Clean glass goes to South Australia, so the material collected through the container deposit scheme will end up going there,” Mr Youé told Business News.
“Our glass is mixed, so our glass goes into road base.”
Mr Youé said the state and federal government funding was positive and essential, given the export bans coming into effect over the next few years.
“We need to deal with our own recycling and waste onshore and not export it to other countries to deal with,” he said.
“That’s what we have been doing for the past 20 years and it’s time that we had a circular economy and dealt with those materials onshore.
“That’s the future we are looking to.”
My Youé said some materials were easier to resell than others.
“I think plastics facilities will be the easiest things to establish because they are affordable and you can scale them up or down,” he said.
“The most difficult is how you deal with newspaper and cardboard in WA because we don’t have the volume, so you would need to build an expensive plant and it would be expensive because you don’t have the supply.”
However, for the new system to work, government and businesses needed to be willing to buy recycled products over virgin materials, he said.
A big-picture solution to improving waste recovery rates, Mr Youé said, was to ensure manufacturers stopped making materials that were difficult to recycle, or made them responsible for the recycling of their products.
He said two of the seven codes of plastic, including HDPE, which is used to make white plastic milk bottles, and PET, used for soft drink bottles, were easy to recycle, while the rest were more challenging.
“Those two plastics are very readily recyclable, you can turn them back into pellets and you can make new things out of them,” Mr Youé said.
Recycling record
According to the WA auditor general’s ‘Waste Management – Service Delivery’ report, published in August 2020, the most recent data (from 2017-18) shows WA has a household waste recovery rate of 41 per cent, well below the 2020 target of 65 per cent.
In major regional centres the recovery rate was 28 per cent, well short of the target the government set of 50 per cent.
The report, which audited the waste services of six local governments and the state government, found while kerbside waste collection was largely effective, not all councils were encouraging waste avoidance or maximising waste recovery, meaning the state was not on track to meet its 2020 targets.
It called for a state waste infrastructure plan to: identify locations for new processing facilities; improve data collected on how much waste is collected and recycled; encourage the uptake of the FOGO (food organics, garden organics) system by providing local governments with more information; and work together on behavioural change campaigns.
Waste Authority chair Reg Howard-Smith said the authority had already started solving the issues raised in the report, given the data was from 2017-18.
He said the Waste Authority was working with local governments to improve data collection and develop waste plans.
Meanwhile, the industry is undergoing significant change, with the Act under which the authority operates currently out for consultation.
The state government is also working towards the goals set in the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Strategy 2030, which was published in late 2019 and states 75 per cent of materials should be recovered by 2030.
“It is an ambitious target but achievable target, there is no doubt about that,” Mr Howard-Smith said.
He said there were three major challenges in meeting the target: ensuring organics were composted; reusing construction and demolition waste; and reducing contamination in household waste.
Mr Howard-Smith said the uptake of the FOGO system, where residents have three bins – one for recycling, one for waste and one for organics – was central to the government’s plan.
One of the concerns the authority had was that some councils in the Perth metropolitan region had signed contracts for their organic FOGO material to be processed in waste-to-energy plants, instead of being sold as compost.
“That will impact on our ability to achieve our targets, so the clear message from all levels of government is this should only be what’s left after you have recovered,” Mr Howard-Smith said.
“I think community demand on these councils will be such that they will have to change to recycling.”
Waste-to-energy plants are not high on the waste hierarchy as they are less environmentally friendly than other options.
He said government departments, including Main Roads Western Australia and local councils, needed to use more construction and demolition waste when building new infrastructure projects (see page 23).
Mr Howard-Smith said the third threat to the government reaching the target was the contamination of yellow-top bins.
Consistent messaging and building on the campaigns the state government had built could improve this, however.
“I think we will [succeed] because there is good public support, but we need to be reinforcing those messages,” Mr Howard-Smith said.
South Metropolitan Regional Council’s Mr Youé agreed, and said the contamination of household waste was a big issue.
“We get huge amounts of contamination these days and people often put in things which aren’t readily recyclable through the facilities available,” Mr Youé said.
“Like soft plastics and textiles, a whole range of things ends up going to landfill because they aren’t recyclable through the recycling stream.”
He said his member councils had contamination rates of between 8 per cent and 10 per cent, but other councils could have anywhere up to 38 per cent.
“Some local governments invest in educating their communities much more than others and you can see a direct correlation between that spend and what’s in the bin,” Mr Youé said.
South Metro Regional Council runs the Recycle Right program, which has a website and a mobile phone app, to educate people on what goes in each bin.
It also organises bin tagging, which involves officers checking bins and evaluating how well a household is recycling and providing feedback.
However, Professor Newman said members of the public would do their part when they were certain what they were putting in the bin was being recycled.
“We need to be convinced that there is a serious strategy and partnerships being set up, industry doing their bit, getting investment to make the most of it and we will do our bit,” he said.
