How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter? Why landfill levies encourage behaviour change – Australia
Posted on March 28, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations, Plastic RecyclingSeventy per cent of the growth in recycling in the past 20 years is explained by the rise in landfill levies. They change behaviour by making recycling a cheaper option than landfill.
Supporting recycling
There has been a lot of soul searching around the demise of recyclers including REDcycle in recent times. REDcycle was an innovative soft plastic collection system but it suffered from unstable offtake arrangements and reuse opportunities. These cases prove a number of things:
- it is hard to compete with cheap landfill for low value recycling streams such as soft plastics (84 per cent of plastic packaging goes to landfill);
- it is expensive to collect, sort, wash and process recyclables – recyclers need a decent gate fee;
- recycled products need viable and continuing markets or offtake – recyclers need minimum recycled content rules; and
- collection is not recycling because recyclers need to build reprocessing infrastructure that is profitable.
Governments have three levers:
- Bans and mandates.
- Levies and other price signals.
- Education.
Numbers one or two will work. Education in the absence of one or two will not get us there.
Bans and mandates
Various governments have started on bans and mandates. The NSW government has mandated commercial food collections by 2025 and household FOGO by 2030. Well done NSW.
States have started banning problematic single-use plastics, but these are not enough or ubiquitous enough. Mandates and bans need to be massively ramped up. As an example, all of the Extended Producer Responsibility schemes in Australia (TVs and computers, container deposits, tyres) currently recover less than five per cent of waste materials. To achieve the targets, we need to recycle an additional 18mt/year every year by 2030.
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