Australia’s plastics recyclers have taken their fight over the Federal Government’s packaging reform backflip to a national TV audience, with iQRenew and ACOR telling Nine’s 60 Minutes that cost of living is no excuse.
The collapse facing Australia’s plastic recycling sector was the focus of a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday 1 November, “Wasted Opportunity”, reported by Dimity Clancey for Nine.
PKN, which has reported consistently on the plight of soft plastics recyclers over the past year, sees the prime-time coverage as an important step in bringing the industry’s crisis to a wider audience.
The program examined the Federal Government’s decision in September not to progress mandatory packaging reform. Under the reforms promised in 2023 by then environment minister Tanya Plibersek, packaging placed on the Australian market, including imported products, would have had to contain locally recycled content. 60 Minutes reported the plan sat alongside a $130 million package to help recyclers scale up [through the Recycling Modernisation Fund].
Among stakeholders interviewed was iQRenew CEO Danny Gallagher, filmed at the company’s soft plastics processing plant at Kundle Kundle near Taree on the NSW Mid North Coast. The facility turns post-consumer soft plastics into resin pellets used to make new plastic products such as garbage bags and other packaging items.
Gallagher told the program more than $26 million had been invested in the site in the anticipation that the government would keep to its commitment, and that now the business could collapse within months.
“Industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and now the government is not putting that regulation in place. They’ve backflipped,” he said. He added that half a dozen recyclers had gone into administration over the previous six to eight weeks.
Environment Minister Murray Watt told 60 Minutes the government had to balance environmental impacts and recyclers’ viability against the cost of living pressures facing shoppers. Asked about the cost to households, he said the modelling he had seen pointed to increases of “around the 50 cents a week mark, which I recognise is not very high”.
Australian Council of Recycling (ACOR) CEO Suzanne Toumbourou said ACOR’s own figures put the cost at 30 cents a week per household, at most. “I don’t buy that for a second,” she said of the government’s cost of living argument.
“In terms of plastic recycling, it is at breaking point,” Toumbourou said. “Around 90 per cent of plastic that we use in this country comes in from overseas, so we have to recycle it here.”
She said consumers were already paying twice: “You pay at the counter for the plastic packaging on your product and then you pay to dispose of it… we’re paying for it to be wasted.”
Following the broadcast, iQRenew posted on LinkedIn that “Australia cannot afford to bury its recycling industry”, warning that around three million tonnes of plastic packaging goes to landfill every year and that this figure will rise without reform.
“We’re on our knees. We need packaging reform. We need a functioning domestic recycling industry,” the company said.
Watch the full segment, “Wasted Opportunity”, on 9Now or the 60 Minutes Australia YouTube channel.
Related articles on PKN covering the soft plastics recycling crisis:
https://www.packagingnews.com.au/sustainability/soft-plastics-recyclers-seek-supply-lifeline
https://www.packagingnews.com.au/latest/soft-plastics-recycler-needs-feedstock
https://www.packagingnews.com.au/latest/packaging-reform-industry-voices-on-the-record
