Page 1213 - Week 03 - Thursday, 31 March 2011
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looking at, as I said, composting and putting back into improved soils, but also those recyclables can be then reused at the higher end of the market. This obviously has economic benefits for the ACT.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Minister for Transport, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Land and Property Services, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (3.28): The ACT government is committed to the waste hierarchy. The waste hierarchy is a fundamental and well-recognised principle of waste management and is embedded in the Waste Minimisation Act 2001. It directs us to avoid products becoming waste in the first place, to reduce and reuse, to find alternative uses for waste, to recycle and recover and, as a last resort, to safely dispose of waste.
Source separation has a significant role in each of these tasks and is already employed to a large extent, it has to be said, in the ACT in kerbside recycling, resource recovery centres and private sector waste and recyclable collections. Unfortunately, the many opportunities for source separation that already exist are not fully utilised. The government is playing a very active role in educating business, government, event managers and our broader community to take advantage of these opportunities.
In the ACT we have sound facilities and strategies in place for reusing, recycling and recovering waste, and we have an engineered, lined landfill built to industry best practice standards in which waste can be safely interred. However, year on year, as an increasingly affluent society, Canberrans are generating more waste. Total waste generation per capita in the ACT and Queanbeyan in 2009-10 was 2.06 tonnes. According to the EPHC national waste report of 2010, the ACT was one of the highest generators of waste per capita in Australia, second only to Western Australia. Over the last 10 years, total waste generation in the ACT has grown at over five per cent per annum on average, outstripping population growth. We are each producing more waste, and there are more of us.
There have been some successful strategies in the past to avoid the creation of waste, such as national efforts to reduce packaging waste, and I am pleased that the draft ACT sustainable waste strategy contains new strategies to deal with this. I would expect, however, that this will be and remain our greatest challenge.
Increasing waste generation is not a problem merely for governments. It is a problem caused by increasing consumption and it can and should be addressed by consumers themselves. People create unnecessary waste when they purchase products that are not used, such as food that is bought but discarded and unwanted gifts. The tendency to purchase products with short lives, such as cheap clothes that are rarely worn and devices that are quickly replaced, also contributes. Individual consumers must take responsibility for their purchasing decisions in the first place. They must also take responsibility for the item once bought and ensure that, when they no longer want it, it is reused, recycled or disposed of responsibly.
The government also reduces waste creation by fostering the reuse market through its support to charities that run second-hand shops, its reuse facilities at Mitchell and
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