A spokesperson from the Total Environment Centre (TEC) said the ACCC authorisation of voluntary waste battery collection by B-cycle, extends a broken system, when only a national mandatory stewardship scheme for batteries, with actual targets, will mitigate the environmental and human health risk from this waste stream.
This week, the ACCC granted B-cycle an extended exemption from certain competition laws that will allow the scheme to continue its operation and expand to cover additional batteries, including those in e-mobilitiy devices, those embedded in small electronic devices, and other batteries up to 60kg in weight. The ACCC has authorised this voluntary operation, notwithstanding the widespread support for a mandatory regulated scheme, said Mark Zihrul from TEC.
Despite spending more than $13m p.a, the current industry-led stewardship scheme continually fails to capture more than 80 per cent of their target waste batteries, according to TEC. The organisation believes that the ACCC authorisation risks not just locking in these low collection rates and inadequate systems, but expanding them onto other products.
“The ACCC was hamstrung in many ways, as they don’t have the power to mandate public policy outcomes or reforms, or design a scheme that would actually meet the circular economy goals of the federal government,” said Zihrul. “While they have done their best to increase reporting requirements for transparency, it’s up to B-cycle to set its own targets and there’s no obligation on B-cycle to implement other waste and pollution reduction measures outside of recycling. This authorisation is no substitute for government regulation, which needs to occur all across Australia.”
In providing the exemption, the ACCC made clear that this authorisation is not an indication that the ACCCs approves of, or endorses the scheme, only that the scheme meets the statutory requirements for the exemption in that the public benefits likely to result from the authorised conduct outweighs the likely public detriments.
“While some recycling is undoubtedly better than none, as a society we’re setting ourselves a very low bar, leaving the vast majority of this waste stream unaccounted for, which poses a real risk to human health and the environment. Bcycle does not have a network in place to collect these new battery types, many of which may represent a real fire and explosion risk,” Zihrul said.
“The authorisation gives this industry and government an excuse to defer the real action needed to tackle this problematic waste stream. B-cycle still has no obligation to increase its absurdly low collection rate, nor take action to limit waste and pollution through the lifecycle of batteries in any manner other than recycling.
“There’s no obligation on Bcycle to encourage design improvements that would reduce reliance on the more toxic or harder to recycle elements; no obligations to include recycled content in new batteries, which would reduce reliance on mining for raw materials and support markets for material recovered from recycling; and no obligation to look towards increasing durability or repairability of products.”
Zihrul said that the organisation calls on state and federal governments not to be distracted by this authorisation, and to urgently continue the real work to regulate a mandatory scheme over all batteries.