Ahead of the state and federal environment ministers meeting on 10 December, Australian Council of Recycling CEO Suzanne Toumbourou tells us why Australia must urgently support markets for our homegrown recycling.
We’ve come to take recycling packaging for granted. Unwrap, chuck it in your recycling bin, put it out for collection. Job done. Or is it?
Recycling in Australia is a $19 billion growth industry, providing more than 94,000 jobs and playing a vital role in the circular economy. A viable recycling industry is essential as we move towards a greener, circular economy with less waste. However, it costs more to recycle materials in Australia due to higher wages, energy prices, logistics and our strong environmental regulations.
The Australian Council of Recycling (ACOR) represents an industry that operates across homes, businesses, factories, and construction sites, collecting, sorting, and reprocessing recovered resources to create new products. Our sector recovers and processes a wide array of materials, including metals, glass, plastics, paper, organics, tyres, textiles, oil, e-waste, batteries, and construction materials. Recyclers drive the circular economy, creating new jobs through innovative technologies and delivering critical environmental benefits.
There are three key elements for our recycling industry to be viable: collection, processing, and end markets. While most manufacturers can choose their raw materials, recyclers often have to contend with material streams that may be contaminated with non-recyclables or hazardous items such as batteries. They are also governed by strict environmental rules about how much material they can store, so it’s crucial that processing happens in a timely manner and storage thresholds are not exceeded. Finally, recyclers need robust markets for their products; without them, the whole operation becomes unviable.
However, there is currently an imbalance between the rules for importing and exporting recycled materials. While it is cheap and easy to import recycled materials from overseas, Australia has enacted legislation to regulate the export of unprocessed recovered packaging. This was done to prevent the export of waste and promote domestic recycling. However, while Australia has restricted the export of unprocessed glass, plastic, and paper, it still allows the import of cheaply produced recycled materials, displacing markets for domestically processed products. This inconsistency undermines the viability of Australia’s recycling industry, and it must change.
In Australia, we import more packaging material than we produce. Every piece of packaging in our country — whether locally made or imported — ultimately ends up in Australian bins. Once used, the packaging is collected, sorted, and reprocessed by local recyclers. Imported packaging must be reprocessed domestically. The challenge lies in ensuring that this reprocessed material has a robust, sustainable market. To support a viable domestic recycling system, we must mandate the procurement of locally recycled packaging.
Recyclers need demand for their goods in order to operate. If Australian companies stop recycling, who will process the packaging that has been carefully collected in our recycling system? If we don’t ensure our rules support Australian recycling, we’ll end up with mountains of unusable materials destined for landfill.
Australia’s Environment Ministers have agreed to introduce national packaging regulations aimed at ensuring packaging sold in Australia is recyclable and does not contain harmful chemicals. And — perhaps most importantly, to ensure packaging materials continue to circulate in the recycling loop — governments want to require that packaging sold in Australia must contain recycled material. We definitely need this reform, but we need to get it right.
On behalf of our nation’s recyclers, ACOR is calling on Australian governments to act to ensure Australia can continue to recycle packaging. Three steps will help:
• The fees or levies that underpin the forthcoming packaging reform must be leveraged to ensure that Aussie recycled content can compete with imported material.
• Strict environmental standards must be imposed to weed out unscrupulous operators and ensure that imported recycled materials meet the same stringent standards as those recycled domestically.
• We also need to establish mandatory thresholds for domestic recycled content in packaging, supporting a steady market for locally produced materials and driving innovation in the recycling sector.
We need governments to act now to support the viability of Australian recycling. Cheap and unverified imports of recycled materials will undermine local recycling and ultimately push us further away from the zero-waste future we are all working towards. Without the right rules in place, our circular economy will flatline.
Read the ACOR policy on recycled content in packaging here.
