Page 3393 - Week 09 - Thursday, 24 August 2017
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Next I turn to the issue of waste. The ACT Greens would like to see a waste management system that results in a lot less material going to landfill. We believe waste should be treated as a resource and processed in a way that achieves maximum economic and environmental benefits. But the ACT’s recycling rate is not increasing and the amount that goes to landfill is not decreasing. What we are doing is not working.
The ACT Greens strongly support the container deposit scheme funded in the budget, and we have called for this for a very long time. We are pleased it will be established early in 2018. According to the Boomerang Alliance, every year Australians consume drinks from around 13 billion containers, but only about 40 per cent of these are recycled. (Second speaking period taken.) I understand the South Australian container deposit scheme has approximately an 80 per cent return rate for drink containers, and I am hopeful our scheme will be just as successful. Importantly, with New South Wales doing it as well, it will bring us into line with the bigger area around us.
While the container deposit scheme is important, the ACT needs a holistic waste strategy. I am looking forward to the ACT waste feasibility study which is due later this year. Hopefully it will provide a clear, overarching strategy about how our waste is managed. In particular, the ACT needs to develop systems to divert organics, including food waste, away from landfill. As our population grows and more people live in apartments, the rate of organics going to landfill is likely to increase. I hope the waste feasibility study will identify systems for the collection of organic waste and propose marketable uses for the compost and methane gas produced.
The management of this waste stream is vitally important for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring the ACT can meet its climate change targets. On this, I will be very interested to hear more about the results of the first rollout of the green waste bins in Canberra: what is actually going into them, what is actually being produced out of this really valuable organic waste and will they be extended to food waste.
Another issue that needs to be addressed is that of the generation of energy from waste, and this is a live issue in the ACT at this point of time. I have asked questions about it in this place. The ACT Greens have said we will not support mass incineration projects that increase the risk of harm to health or the environment and do not represent high value uses of resources. We also very much do not want to create a perverse incentive to generate more waste to feed a waste to energy plant to ensure its financial viability.
It is important that any future technology considered by the ACT is scrutinised with regard to emissions, its ability to maximise the recovery of high value resources, and even more important than all of this possibly is strategies to reduce the production of waste. I agree that is probably outside a lot of the remit of city services, but, nonetheless, in terms of making Canberra more ecologically sustainable, this is one of the principal things we need to do. Our rate of consumption is driving our environmental impact. If we can reduce that, we can reduce our environmental impact and almost certainly at the same time save money, so a win-win.
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