I spot it. A shadow in the ocean in front of me. A manta ray gliding through the deep blue water. I'm off the coast of Nusa Pendida, a tiny island south-east of Bali, at a time when coronavirus seemed a distant and unlikely threat. We'd come here to swim with manta rays, a memorable way to mark my partner's 30th birthday.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But that's not a ray I've seen. Upon closer inspection, it's a plastic bag undulating with the tide. I'm snorkelling in a floating trash pile.The coral reef is strewn with a kaleidoscope of plastic straws. A tropical fish darts after a lid. I surface to see ocean belching plastic onto the shoreline. Plastic bottles bob in the waves around me. An orphaned thong drifts by. It's the saddest and most revolting sight I've ever seen. I felt helpless watching it, like one of those discarded bottles powerless against the tide. I went back to that moment when Environment Minister Sussan Ley said this week mixed plastic from the Hume materials recycling facility was exported to Indonesia. Were my Canberra Milk cartons contributing to the floating trash piles I'd been swimming in?
According to Garth Lamb from Re.Group - the company which runs the Hume recycling centre - no. Around 95 per cent of recyclable material that goes to Hume stays in Australia, including the milk bottles.
Around 50 per cent of recycling in the average Canberrans' yellow bin is paper and cardboard, which is sent from Hume to the paper mill at Tumut for processing. Another 30 per cent is glass, which is crushed into sand at Hume and used in local civil construction works. Another 10 to 15 per cent is non-recyclable waste which should not have been in the yellow bin in the first place and is sent to landfill, while the remaining 5 to 10 per cent is various grades of plastic as well as metals. The Hume centre pulls out the PET - those plastic drink bottles - and HDPE - your humble milk bottle - and sells it to domestic recyclers in NSW. The tiny fraction remaining then goes to markets like Indonesia.
"The recyclable materials that are exported include the lower-value mixed plastic, which is only about 2 per cent of input, and metals that are also about 2 per cent of input," Lamb says.
"The whole purpose of recycling is to get materials back into the productive economy, being used again instead of digging up new virgin resources. Because a lot of the lower-grade plastic materials in our waste stream are made overseas, the demand for those type of raw materials is overseas.
"China is the world's biggest manufacturer, so it has the world's biggest demand for raw materials, and that's why it was the world's biggest buyer of recycled materials. And that's why the global recycling sector was so heavily impacted when China decided to stop importing a lot of the recycled materials it used to buy."
The $21 million upgrade of the recycling centre the minister was announcing when she made the Indonesia comment (and sent me on a mental spiral) will help Re.Group better separate and process recycling streams, including around 23,000 tonnes of paper and mixed cardboard, 1800 tonnes of mixed plastics and 14,000 tonnes of glass.
The money for Canberra was the first grant to come from a $190 million Recycling Modernisation Fund revealed by the federal government last week. The fund is tipped to drive a billion-dollar transformation of Australia's waste and recycling capability, diverting more than 10 million tonnes of waste from landfill.
The fact there is finally action at a federal level on waste is noteworthy in itself and a reflection of the seismic shift in the way Australians think about their rubbish and recycling in recent years.
"For a long time, it was an 'out of sight out of mind' issue where most people didn't think twice about what happens after they wheeled out a yellow bin on collection night," Lamb says.
"Then we saw impacts such as the collapse of a major recycler in Melbourne, and all of a sudden people realised some of the huge challenges the recycling sector has been facing.
"I think the Australian community was really disappointed to learn that a lot of the material they thought was being recycled and reused locally was actually being exported to countries that didn't have the same environmental and worker protections that we take for granted in Australia. And to their great credit, our Australian government has responded to this with very real and very important steps to build our domestic recycling capacity and keep more value onshore."
READ MORE:
From July 1 next year, Australia will ban the export of unprocessed glass. Mixed plastics that are not of a single resin or polymer type will be banned from export from July 1 2021. By 2024 all waste plastic, paper, glass and tyres will be banned from export. However there are fears the ban could lead to more waste ending up in landfill.
"In nearly all cases, Australia is a net importer of manufactured goods. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to consume all, or even the majority, of many recycled materials within Australia because there simply isn't sufficient demand for this material," Waste Contractors and Recyclers Association NSW executive Tony Khoury told a parliamentary inquiry earlier this year.
"We support the intent of COAG's decision however it will be impossible to recycle and reuse more of this material onshore unless governments assist in establishing policy settings, supporting new infrastructure and creating demand for recycled products.
"Without this, the most likely outcome is that this material, that was previously predominantly recycled overseas, may end up in landfill in Australia. This has the potential to destroy the faith and reputation the community has had in the recycling industry," he said.
Lamb says the fundamental challenge facing Australia's recycling industry is that there are not enough Australian markets for all the recycled materials we can recover.
"A lot of the material that used to be exported in the past is now trying to find its way into local markets, which is why we're seeing a focus on building domestic capacity," he says.
Making mixed plastics recycling happen here in Australia will require more investments like the one at Hume, Lamb says.
"We need new facilities, such as are part of the funding announcement for the Hume MRF, where plastics are further sorted and value-added," he says.
"Instead of making bales of mixed material that get sent overseas for someone else to sort through and recover each type of plastic, we want to sort that material here. We want to shred it and wash it, so the end product is ready for user who need it as a raw material to make new products.
"And because we're doing that in Australia, we can be assured of the highest environmental standards when it comes to things like cleaning up and recycling the water used in the washing process, and responsibly disposing of any contaminated materials rather than letting them build up in the natural environment."
