Page 3402 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 22 August 2018
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Members may also be aware that in June this year the Senate released the report of its inquiry into the waste and recycling industry in Australia. One of its recommendations was that we should phase out petroleum-based, single-use plastics by 2023. Obviously, that is an excellent recommendation and it would solve a lot of the problems which members have identified so far in the discussion. It would be a real shift, because currently we have convenient plastic products which we use once and throw away, and they are ubiquitous throughout Australia.
One thing I should say as part of this debate is that plastic is not intrinsically evil. The problem is, however, that it is really convenient, it is really cheap and it is really durable. It is waterproof, and it solves a lot of problems; thus we use an awful lot of it. When you drop it, it does not break, like glass does. But because it is so easy to use, it leads to some of the problems that members like Ms Orr have talked about. The impact on marine life is appalling.
My first look at that was when I visited India in 1997, from memory. India in those days had not changed an awful lot from the days of the British raj. A lot of towns were red fort towns. There would be a fort in the middle and there would be a moat around the town. That was your traditional way of building a defensive town. That moat was filled with water. At every single one of them, you could not see the water; they were 100 per cent covered in plastic. Everywhere we went, it did not matter who it was; they just chucked plastic out of the window. It was much worse than anything you would see in Australia. That was because they had only just come from a culture where they did not have plastics. You had your meal on a banana leaf, you chucked it out of the window and in a week’s time, in the humidity and heat, it had biodegraded. We are not in that situation anymore, so we have to change our relationship with plastics.
We have two issues. We have the resources that are used in making plastics and we have the part that we are concentrating more on in this particular debate: what happens when we dispose of it. Because plastic is so versatile and cheap, we have adopted it in lots of single-use, throwaway consumer products.
We have been talking in the past couple of days about the Multicultural Festival. It was in the Canberra Times again today. What do we have at the Multicultural Festival? We have the ACT government giving away free bottled water in throwaway plastic bottles. We have many organisations doing that. You name it; we have plastic on it. Our medical system is full of single-use plastics. If you go on a plane, all the food is wrapped in single-use plastics. What about clothing? There are a lot of poly-type jackets, which, I must admit, I really love wearing. Sometimes they have been made of recycled plastics but often they are made of single-use plastics.
A lot of people are looking at technological solutions to our plastic problems. These range from better recycling techniques and biodegradable plastics made from algae or starch, to using mutant bacteria to consume plastic waste. The Environment Centre runs regular monthly workshops on plastic-free wraps, and things you can do to avoid having plastic in your life. I have made the odd beeswax wrap. I suspect that these technological changes are not going to be the only part of the change that we need, but
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video