Why the North Shore's plastic ends up in the Southern Tablelands – and how producers are dodging the bill

Forcing manufacturers of plastic to take responsibility for their products from the cradle to the grave may be the only solution to breaking our addiction with plastic packaging, according to experts.

In 2018 Australian industry and governments set non-binding targets about the extent to which plastics would be recycled and phased out by 2025. 

The latest figures, from 2022/23, show there is no cause for celebration: we are still tipping far too much plastic into the ground.

For example, the goal was to have 70 percent of plastic packaging being recycled or composted by 2025, but the 2023/23 figure was at just 19 percent, which was in fact down one percent from the year prior.

If you live on the North Shore, the rubbish you put in your red bins — including all the non-recyclable plastic — is likely travelling all the way down to the Southern Tablelands, where it goes into landfill.

In the LGA of Willoughby alone, 14,037 tonnes of red bin rubbish was sent in the last year to this landfill site. 

While it’s true that some people may be not sorting their rubbish properly, experts say that the ultimate responsibility isn’t with the individual.

According to Suzanne Toumbourou, CEO of the Australian Council of Recycling, this one isn’t on you: it’s on the government, and the companies producing the packaging.

Toumbourou told the Lorikeet that while the everyday, individual acts of using keepcups and reusable containers can help in the short term, meeting targets required federal reform.

“I'm really reticent to put more pressure on communities that are already trying their best to live well. I would be suggesting let your local MP know that packaging regulation is important to you.”

She said companies that produce plastic need to be held responsible for its entire lifecycle. This could be achieved by implementing legal and financial punishments for industries — potentially all the way from manufacturers to retailers — that do not meet mandatory targets for recycling of their products. The theory is that only by setting legislated targets will plastic manufacturers seek out sustainable solutions to single-use plastic packaging. 

How might this look in the future? Toby Hutcheon of Boomerang Alliance — an environmental group fighting waste and plastic pollution — gave us the example of the return and earn scheme, where the beverage industry is “required to pay a 10 cent refund to anyone who returns a container … but they also have to ensure that those return containers end up going to recycling and not to litter or landfill”.

And it’s not just our environment that would benefit from this reform, but our hip pockets.

“Producers have very successfully been able to shift the cost of waste,” Hutcheon said. “When we discard it, it's largely councils and their ratepayers who are paying to collect, recycle or landfill all of that packaging.”

Image Credit: Engin Akyurt via Unsplash