Why landfill levies encourage behaviour change – Australia

Posted on March 28, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations, Plastic Recycling

Source

Seventy 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.