Page 1966 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 23 June 2021
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lot of those companies were calling out for government and council partnerships to help them set up schemes.
That is why I have brought this motion to the Assembly today. I am asking the government to investigate recycling arrangements for all electrical appliances, solar panels and large batteries that power our EVs, buildings and grids. I am asking for the government to report back by February next year with some options and a time line to recycle each of these items.
Once we have those schemes set up, we can then consider banning them from landfill, as we have with televisions and computers. This will recover the precious resources that we need to build our net-zero economy. It will create green jobs, and there are a lot of jobs in recycling. There are three times more than there are in landfill. It will boost support for the new tech that is replacing our outdated fossil fuels. It will save our land and our waterways, and it will make sure that we are not building endless landfills. It will really start us on the way to that circular economy.
This will also protect our planet for future generations and for the young people who are here with us right now. These young people understand custodianship in a way that my generation never did. They get climate change. They understand why the land and the environment matter.
When you are considering this motion, please remember the words of a seven-year-old. Recycling is better than throwing stuff away. It helps the planet, and it ensures that stuff does not go to landfill. I commend this motion to the Assembly.
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (3.25): Thanks, Ms Clay, for bringing forward this motion today. It does bear some resemblance to a motion that I brought into this place in 2019, when I called on the government to do a range of things, including undertaking studies into how solar panels and batteries are disposed of in countries where solar is a major source of renewable energy; developing a territory-wide plan for the safe disposal of both panels and batteries that does not involve additional costs on households and businesses, or add to the increasing landfill problem in the ACT; and reporting back to the Assembly by the last sitting week of November 2019 on what safe disposal options would be made available and when such arrangements would be in place.
Reflecting on Ms Clay’s motion today, it makes me think that if we had agreed to some of those items in my motion of 2019, we may have been slightly further along the path than we are, as we stand here today. Ms Clay has acknowledged that, in previous Assemblies, some motions addressed some of the waste streams, but they did not result in recycling arrangements in the ACT.
I appreciate that Ms Clay and some of the other Greens members here were not in the Assembly at the time, but I could tell them why my motion in 2019 did not result in recycling arrangements in the ACT, mostly regarding solar panels and batteries. When we debated this in June 2019, the Labor-Greens government moved amendments to weaken my motion and place the onus on the federal government. This is an interesting approach from a government that often likes to tout that it leads the way
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