In May this year, I was invited to speak at the Waste 2023 Coffs Harbour conference as a panel member and veteran of the industry. This put me in a reflective mood. We were asked to look back on what we’d achieved, what were the crucial step changes and what lessons we’d learned along the way.
Reflecting on a 40-year career, one that’s spanned the breadth of the sector — from council, community, commercial, charity and consultancy, including roles as diverse as managing the introduction of kerbside recycling in NSW, CEO of the Australian Council of Recyclers (ACOR) and as a board member at Zero Waste SA — I was thinking how this had given me unique insights into the multi-faceted waste and resource-recovery sector.
My career began at Ku-Ring-Gai, a progressive north-shore council in Sydney. Like many councils then and now, waste collection was contracted out to a third party, with residents offered 55-litre bins serviced twice a week. The many challenges ranged from a highly casualised workforce, as well as a high absenteeism from ‘sickies’, a proliferation of workers’ compensation claims from manual handling coupled with a general resident dissatisfaction about dogs upending and scavenging from bins to rubbish bins being thrown into trees, over hedges and regularly run over by cars. Then there was the habitual Sunday backyard incinerator sessions, where anything green or surplus to requirements was fair game, and leaf-burning in council gutters was acceptable, which generated huge plumes of choking smoke before air-quality standards were introduced.
Council had both vision and leadership and looked overseas for solutions. It introduced Australia’s first 340-litre mobile garbage bins (MGBs) in 1978, and with them the first side-loading collection vehicles. The rest is history, with a tsunami of councils introducing wheelie bins nationally and thereby transforming the manual handling of waste collection into a system of skilled drivers working in air-conditioned comfort — Step Change number 1.
Recycling of scrap metal had occurred for decades, driven by economics and commodity value. By the early 1980s, South Australia had the introduced a container deposit scheme and ad-hoc approaches to recycling of glass by scouts and waste paper for hospitals. Comalco introduced the highly successful ‘Cash for Cans’ program and glass refillables were being replaced by single-use plastic PET bottles. Milk came in glass bottles.
A decade later, we had an ‘environmental awakening’, with a hole in the ozone, the first ever Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and a mandate to ‘think globally and act locally’. At home, we were busy planting trees. Clean Up Australia was born and, for the first-time, the federal government set recovery targets on the beverage industry and its packaging suppliers.
Industry responded by looking overseas once again, to the kerbside recycling ‘Blue Box’ program in Canada. The MGBs in Europe were designed to co-collect paper and containers or general waste, and recycling was at the forefront. Globally, communities were demanding more of industry and looking for government policy interventions to drive change and investment.
Back home, driven by Recycle Sydney and Recycle NSW, councils invested in black 50-litre crates. These were collected weekly or fortnightly on garbage day for glass, paper, cans and PET with materials sorted at the kerb. In Victoria, depots that were already up and running were converted into basic material recovery facilities (MRFs) and poly-woven bags were provided to residents. These were the foundation of the current kerbside recycling.
Industry evolution
As packaging continued to increase and recycling opportunities opened up for more plastic polymers, crates became MGBs as more capacity was needed. Smaller companies were taken over by bigger companies with deeper pockets to finance bins, side-loading trucks and MRFs. Asset management was needed for bin stocks and contractors invested time and money in understanding compaction impacts. Contracts had risk-sharing clauses along with rise and fall as the norm. End markets were secured both locally and globally, quality specifications dictated sale prices, and recycled content increased in everything from detergent bottles to newspapers. Coca-Cola was able to reduce PET to its molecular structure and rebuild the polymer into a new food-grade container — Australia had the first, true ‘bottle to bottle’.
Today, 40 per cent of all 240-litre recycling bins are overflowing, leading some councils to offer 360-litre bins to help capture all recyclables. We see contamination levels heading north of 20 per cent, as paper use continues to decline and used beverage containers are diverted to container refund schemes.
We have more communication bombardment than ever before, although the messaging is diluted with the many and varied forums. We have seen the success of national campaigns that changed society. Remembers ‘do the right thing’, ‘click-clack, front and back’ and ‘slip, slop, slap’ campaigns, but where is the ‘recycle right’ campaign? Is it because we have confused ourselves?
At Coffs, I asked the audience, “should we have lids on or lids off or we don’t really know”. The sad reality is the response was about a third for each option. If we, as the waste professionals don’t know, how is the consumer going to work it out?
Back in the 1970s, someone decided to put the plastic polymer ID number on all packaging inside the recycling modus loop. What they didn’t consider was how it would be interpreted by Joe Public. Finally, after 30 years, in response to total consumer confusion, APCO has driven the adoption of the Australian Recycling Label (ARL) for its members to assist confused customers figure out which bin is correct for the plethora of used packaging.
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The implementation of bin audits helped demystify what was really going into the bins. After recycling was conquered, we set our sights on garden waste. Another wave of bins ensued, with alternate fortnightly services with recycling to maximise the fleet, another round of resident education (‘do not place garden gnomes, garden hose or plastic bags in the bin — just clean garden waste, leaves and plants, please’). Compost-processing facilities were tasked with cleaning up the mess and transforming it into a saleable commodity. A national roadmap set out the journey required to remodel the sector into a viable entity, including trials to prove what we already knew — organics help things grow better.
Today, bin audits tell us there are almost no garden organics in the rubbish bin and that around 15 per cent are recyclables even after three decades of tireless efforts. Approximately 40 per cent is food. NSW has mandated food waste recovery by 2030 from domestic bins and by 2025 for industry. We have many successful food organics and garden organics (FOGO) programs forged by the early work in South Australia more than a decade ago. We know the ingredients for a successful program — kitchen caddies, bio-bags that meet the Australian Standard (to reduce the ‘yuck’ factor), weekly FOGO or food only (FO) and fortnightly general waste.
However, the added complexity to be conquered this time, is the increased urbanisation, with medium- and high-rise living becoming the norm. Here, waste chutes prevail and bin storage rooms are already full. Education and messaging for the highly transient resident population also presents challenges. A council’s job is never done. We must also develop new processing capacity for an estimated one million tonnes of new organics in NSW alone. Where will it all go? Resource recovery is only sustainable when there are markets and buyers otherwise we will all pay more.
Consumerism has driven more of everything. Industry responded with more products, packaging and increasing complexity. The advent of composites — multi-material containers and products that aren’t easy to disassemble or recycle — is of considerable concern. The proliferation of e-waste from mobile phones, computers, laptops, monitors, TVs and peripherals continues to grow with ever shorter lifecycles.
Some manufacturers have stepped up and are taking responsibility for their contribution to the increasing landfill volumes. Many still don’t or won’t. Although extended producer responsibility (EPR) has become part of the vernacular, from my perspective, there’s a lot of talk and not much action. Decades were lost while industry made every possible effort to avoid regulation, achieving little progress toward tackling the problem. The same thing continues 30 years on. We are slow learners, but our new federal environment minister means business and has had enough and has put industry on notice. What we all desperately need is some strong national leadership.
While I’ve witnessed the most transformative period for domestic solid waste management, we can all only wonder at what lies ahead in the hands of a new generation of entrepreneurs, policy-makers and community members. It can be more of the same or we can be bold and brave and make some hard decisions and planet, people and profit can co-exist. Just maybe….