Page 1480 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 7 May 2008
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coup for the water industries, which often mine their waters unsustainably, including those in Fiji, where water is not safe to drink—however, we buy their water in bottles—and whether the whole water industry has precipitated this issue enormously and created a commodity out of something that should be a human right. I will quote now from my colleague Ian Cohen’s speech on this subject:
The covenant systems and methodologies for measuring recycling rates gains have been shown to be open to manipulation and no objective criterion to evaluate annual reports has been properly adopted. … Aspirational language couched in weak commitments is the hallmark of the current regime, the National Packaging Covenant. The poor results that have been reported in the covenant’s annual reports are indicative of a regulatory system that is big on aspirational discretionary rules and low on objective benchmarks and obligations.
The recently leaked audit of the national recycling report … demonstrates that self-regulation has not only failed, but may have pushed us backwards on recycling rates. … Industry and government signatories have committed to increase the amount of post-consumer packaging recycled from its current rate of 48 per cent, using 2003 baseline data, to 65 per cent by 2010. The National Packaging Covenant 2005-06 annual report revealed that, at publication, the current rate of recycling was 56 per cent, which was 9 per cent off the 2010 target. However, the Pitcher Partners data review report covering the National Packaging Covenant 2005-06 annual report dated November 2007 showed total recycling rates at 48 per cent.
That is 17 people cent below the 65 people cent objective. He goes on:
That is exactly where we were in 2003.
If we take into account further amendments to the paper and cardboard component, the total packaging rate figure drops back to 43 per cent. The leaked audit confirms that glass packaging recycling rates are floundering at 36 per cent, not 44 per cent as industry claims. The audit further highlighted that the people of Australia cannot trust data produced by covenant participants. Visy Industries was caught out including glass recycled from New Zealand, which bolstered the Australian result by almost 70,000 tonnes. Amcor confused newspaper and office paper recycling with cardboard and carton packaging, boosting the figure by almost 300,000 tonnes. These reports cast dark clouds over the industry's characterisation of empirical data of the covenant.
Cooking the books on recycling rates by covenant participants has exhausted the community’s faith in the process.
And it should have exhausted this government’s faith in the process. In contrast to the hopeless mess that the rest of Australia have had foisted upon them by governments that were too ignorant, too naive, too lazy or blinded by free market ideology to adequately assess the effectiveness of the voluntary scheme and react with decisive measures before now, the South Australian government has achieved a recycling rate of 70 per cent for beverage containers, which has provided a new income stream for community organisations and the state’s most disadvantaged groups. It has also created a revenue stream for local councils sufficient to pay nearly the entire cost of their kerbside recycling programs.
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