Page 4086 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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of household sector waste and about 10 to 20 per cent of commercial waste, which means that organic waste is about 25 per cent of the total annual landfill figure. This was about 214,000 tonnes at the last audit in 2008-09.
If we can address this, it will radically reduce the amount of material going to landfill and reduce the associated methane gas emissions. Possibly even more importantly, if the organics are collected and processed properly, they are a very valuable tool for improving soils and sequestering carbon. This will reduce our footprint by allowing local sustainable food production. Without food, there is no life. Improving organic waste recycling is part of the ALP-Greens parliamentary agreement and it is something that we have been pushing for for a very long time.
One of the more important issues is household consumption. Members may remember that earlier this year I introduced a motion which sought to measure the energy consumption of a whole house, rather than simply an energy rating which is a per square metre measurement. Unfortunately, neither the Liberals nor the Labor Party supported that. It is very important that we construct houses with as low an ecological footprint as possible, that the appliances in them do not use excessive energy and that they are not bigger than needed. One of the most problematic issues with larger houses is that we all tend to fill space up with stuff. I am guilty of this. I have two sheds which are filled with stuff. In terms of reducing consumption, one of the things we can do is ensure that we only have what we need, not what might be wanted to fill up large, empty spaces, which will then become large amounts of waste that have to be disposed of.
In the interests of time, because I am aware that there are three other people who wish to speak, I will not continue. I will just finish with what I think we should all be thinking about in this context. It is a quote from, probably, back in the 1970s: “Live simply, so that all may simply live.” This is what we are saying in the context of ecological footprints. We need to live in a way so that we all can live.
DR BOURKE (Ginninderra) (4.06): The ACT Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment commented in the 2007-08 state of the environment report:
We are consuming natural resources at an unsustainable rate and, while efforts are being made to address this, more needs to be done as a matter of urgency, particularly given the correlation between consumption of resources and climate change.
The recent assessment of the ACT’s ecological footprint for 2008-09, published by the commissioner, reports a continuing increase in the footprint. This increase is driven by consumption of food, goods and services and household and transport energy. The government is committed to sustainability as a philosophy that underpins all its work. In 2009 the government released its updated version of “People, place, prosperity”. This is the government’s key sustainability document which guides the implementation of specific policy commitments in the Canberra plan.
The government uses its “measuring our progress” indicators and reporting framework for monitoring progress towards our long-term goals. The Measuring our
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