I was hanging around a city office late one afternoon waiting for my friend to finish off some emails. The office cleaner was doing her job — a bit of dusting, a bit of vacuuming, emptying bins.
When it came to the differently coloured recycle bins — you know the ones: one colour for organic material, one colour for paper products and another one for everything else — I noticed that she was simply tipping all the contents into the same bag. I had a quiet chuckle to myself.
There has been a bit of a recycling crisis in Victoria recently. I understand the crisis is affecting other states. Many households that have dutifully sorted their rubbish and filled their designated recycling bin — ours is blue — have been waiting. Some councils were unable to pick up these overflowing recycling bins for a considerable period.
Wheelie Waste, one of the firms used by local governments to collect these recycling bins, had downed tools, given the collapse in the market for recycled material. The Chinese government has decided to ban imports of recycled material. China was where a lot of our recycled waste was going. There is really no local market for this waste, apart from aluminium cans and some cardboard.
Until recently, these waste collection firms could earn about $50 a tonne by selling plastic, paper, glass and the like to firms such as Visy, which would sell it to China.
The new deal is that these local firms now want to charge $60 a tonne to accept the same material. Add in the cost of collection and you are quickly looking at a cost of more than $100 a tonne for local governments to ensure the continuation of the recycling service households have factored into their lives.
In our case, the local government provides only a small bin for general waste and much larger ones for recycling and green waste.
At this stage, several councils have agreed to pay Wheelie Waste $110 a tonne to resume the collection of recycling bins. This cost impost alone will add 4.5 per cent to the council rates paid by residents.
One of the suggestions put forward by the Victorian government is to build an enormous incinerator that would burn the recycled material and generate energy in the process. This could be a tough sell given that most of the public regards recycling as virtuous. The option of simply burning that carefully sorted material cuts across their feelings of self-satisfaction.
We also have seen extraordinary examples of recycled material being trucked thousands of kilometres out of the Northern Territory because of a lack of local recycling factories — just think through the environmental impact of that — and green waste being sent from Victoria to South Australia because of inadequate recycling options in Victoria.
In the meantime, a recycling sorting business in South Australia has gone out of business after several decades in operation. Rising electricity costs and the absence of markets for much of the output have killed the business model. Expect more operations to go bust.
The reality is that there simply are not deep enough — or any — markets for most recycling material in Australia. We are not talking reuse of these discarded materials, a misconception on the part of some members of the public. We are talking about smashing glass bottles and jars, crushing plastic and paper products. Using copious amounts of electricity, they can be reconverted into their original components. But given that most of the other inputs of these products are cheap and plentiful — sand in the case of glass, for instance — it simply makes more sense to start again rather than recycle.
We may not like it but that’s how it is. It was only because China was prepared to take our unloved recycled material that the recycling merry-go-round could continue to turn.
Something we also have to look forward to in Victoria is the banning of plastic bags in supermarkets. While the state government has made this decision, following the loopy leads of other states and territories, the virtue-signalling supermarkets Coles and Woolworths have decided to withdraw free plastic bags in any case. (You will be able to buy them, of course.)
Working on the basis of zero evidence — actually contrary evidence — hapless Victorian Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio claims the move will “slash waste, reduce litter and help to protect Victorian marine life”. If she had bothered to look at the analysis undertaken by the Productivity Commission on the topic, she would have learned that banning plastic bags does none of these things. In fact, plastic shopping bags are almost universally reused and don’t end up as additional litter. Moreover, when this ban has been introduced in various places, the existing light plastic shopping bags have been replaced by heavier versions, which are more detrimental to the environment.
A recent Danish study has concluded that, in fact, plastic shopping bags are much better for the environment than all the alternatives. Working on the assumption that plastic shopping bags are reused — as bin liners, for instance — the results of the government study show that regular cotton bags must be used 7100 times to make them better for the environment than plastic bags. Organic cotton bags need 20,000 reuses and paper needs 43 reuses — which is surely a big ask.
The results of this Danish study are mirrored in an earlier study undertaken for the British government. Seven types of shopping bags were compared, including the conventional lightweight version made from high-density polythene (the familiar grey ones).
“We calculated how many times each different type of carrier would have to be used to reduce its global warming potential to below that for conventional carrier bags where some 40 per cent were reused as bin liners,” the study says. Other impacts also were assessed.
Again, the results point to very high rates of use for other types of bags — ranging from 173 to 393 reuses for cotton bags, for instance. The point is also made that “recycling or composting generally produced only a small reduction in global warming potential”.
Another example of an evidence-free policy intervention is the NSW government’s cack-handed container deposit scheme. The impact on littering will be minimal, consumers will have to drive to access the collection depots and additional costs will be borne by companies and consumers — all for no positive environmental impact.
The real point is that environment virtue-signalling is not the same as doing something for the environment. To be sure, it would be great if we could generate less waste and that is something we should work on. But once that waste is generated, in most cases, recycling is just a con. In the future, ratepayers will pay an increasing price for this con to be sustained.
And just watch out for those unintended consequences of banning lightweight shopping bags. Who knows what germs are growing in the bottom of your organic cotton shopping bag that you are always forgetting to take to the supermarket?
