Lindy Hughson's reporting this month captured three unlikely allies standing on the same platform: APCO, ACOR and the Boomerang Alliance – an industry co-regulator, a recycling trade body and an environmental campaign group.
Three organisations that spend most of their time disagreeing on detail have converged on the same conclusion: Australia needs a mandatory, nationally consistent extended producer responsibility scheme – despite their best efforts the current mixture of voluntary stewardship arrangements has not delivered results and has run out of steam.
That alignment arrived the same fortnight that the biggest plastics recycler in South Australia, Recycling Plastics Australia, went into administration, taking roughly 60 Adelaide jobs and a significant chunk of the country's plastics-processing capacity (especially in the key area of soft plastics).
It arrived days after Canberra confirmed there will be no new Commonwealth packaging scheme this term. And it arrived alongside an open letter to the Prime Minister, an economic report modelling up to $2.6 billion a year in potential capital investment, and a YouGov poll showing 87 per cent of Australians – across Labor, Coalition, Greens and One Nation voters alike – think government should be acting (as cited by Boomerang Alliance).
This isn't the first broken promise. In 2023 this government committed to a genuine circular economy for packaging, and industry – recyclers like RPA among them – invested on the strength of it. What actually arrived were the waste export restrictions: a ban on shipping recyclable plastic, paper, glass and tyres overseas, with none of the complementary market reform – mandatory recycled content targets, EPR, market development – that was meant to balance the export controls and create the domestic demand those restrictions assumed would follow.
Recyclers were left as the meat in the sandwich: legally required to keep processing material that increasingly has nowhere to go, and financially exposed to a domestic market the government never finished building.
The government's stated reason for holding the line is 'cost of living' and MRA Consulting's Mike Ritchie has already put his finger on the gap: without a regulatory impact statement, he argues, government has no way to properly weigh what reform would cost against what continuing to delay it is already costing.
That's the calculation nobody in Canberra has done. What it would show, if anyone did it, is what the cost of not acting actually looks like. It looks like RPA's 60 jobs and its Adelaide processing line, gone. It looks like the plastic recycling capacity governments spent $137 million building, sitting idle with hundreds more job losses for want of market conditions to make it viable. It looks like investment that won't be made while policy uncertainty persists – Stephen Koukoulas's report alone puts up to $2.6 billion a year of that on the table. And it looks like a landfill and environmental bill that keeps accumulating in the background, year on year, never showing up on a minister's ledger as a cost of delay.
Others have started quantifying pieces of that picture. Koukoulas's report for Soft Plastics Stewardship Australia describes Australia's fragmented state-by-state system as carrying a "fragmentation tax," and estimates $115 million to $278 million a year in net productivity gains from national alignment.
Still on the topic of soft plastics – identified as the most pronounced market failure – Australia imports close to a billion dollars of the material annually, then landfills 94 per cent of it, burning through roughly $900 million in lost material value and $154 million in landfill costs every year. We import it at full price, then pay again to bury it.
That is not cost-of-living relief. That is a subsidy for waste, paid twice.
So here is the more uncomfortable question nobody in this debate wants to ask out loud: if the economic case is this one-sided, why is government still treating packaging reform as a cost to be managed down rather than a policy with obvious public backing?
The answer, I would argue, has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with politics.
The environment in Australia has never been treated as a vote-winning issue in its own right. It gets traded away the moment it collides with a short-term political calculation, because nobody in Canberra believes voters will punish them for delaying it, and nobody has given them a reason to believe otherwise.
That's the part getting swept under the carpet in this debate, possibly my contribution included. Everyone – APCO, ACOR, Boomerang, the open letter's signatories, the economists – is making the policy case brilliantly.
Almost nobody is making the electoral case. And the polling data sitting right there in Boomerang Alliance's own campaign proves it could be made: 87 per cent support, consistent across every party's voters, is not a fringe environmental concern. It is a majority position with no natural political opponent. That's the kind of number a campaign gets built on – instead, it's being used to justify the policy, not to warn politicians it could cost them votes.
If industry and advocates genuinely want to break this cycle, the strategy has to shift. Stop asking ministers to weigh environmental benefit against cost-of-living pain, because that framing hands them the easy answer every time.
Start showing them, in language a marginal-seat MP understands, that failing to act is the unpopular position – that voters already agree, and that continuing to slow-walk reform is what actually carries political risk. Turn the environment from a line item into a liability for whoever ignores it.
Nothing in the current alignment of APCO, ACOR and Boomerang Alliance is wasted. But policy consensus without political consequence is just a well-documented stalemate. Until inaction costs politicians votes instead of just costing the country money, Australia will keep paying for the same plastic twice – and keep being told it can't afford to become a better and more circular economy.
We all have a role in this debate – in shaping a vision for a country that's genuinely progressive and cares for its environment, its people, and its businesses, both locally and globally. There has never been a more urgent moment to do so.
