Page 2314 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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The energy which is lost when our waste is either buried or burnt and must be completely replaced typically via fossil fuel combustion, resulting in completely unnecessary GHG emissions.
There is an enormous amount of literature on the issue of waste management because every country in the world is grappling with it. It is a pity that the minister does not think it is worthwhile listening to what I am saying because I am quite sure that he will refute it in a moment. But what will he be refuting? Will he be refuting it on the grounds that he knows what I said?
There are also concerns that co-mingled waste collections, which are what we have here, might have an impact on climate change. Because of the difficulties of dealing with co-mingled waste collections there is the potential for greater quantities of recyclables being shifted elsewhere for sorting, simply because the technology is not available. I know that we have the technology here and I will be interested to see whether the minister says that we are having similar problems to those that are being picked up in Europe, where paper recyclers are having trouble removing broken glass from paper pulping machines.
I understand that the government will be producing a new action plan to take us through from 2008 to 2010. I look forward to seeing that plan and its new targets, and I hope that it is far more optimistic about what is achievable. I think this has been the major downfall of the government’s thinking on the strategy. I think that it is just too hard and it has given up. It is not too hard and we should not give up. We just need to learn from other municipalities around the country, and certainly in other parts of the globe, where they are much more advanced in this area simply because they have to be. They do not have extensive tracts of land on which to increase infill sites.
Any decent waste minimisation strategy starts with reduce, reuse and recycle—a refrain that is well known to many of us, certainly to people who grew up in Victoria, because that was a sign that we saw all around the place. We hear very little about it in Canberra, so I do not think the message is getting through. Canberra is a very affluent society. I heard recently that the average wage for males in Canberra is about $20,000 higher than the average wage for other Australian males. That means we are also a community that consumes more per capita.
I do not think we need to be scared of promoting the “reduce, reuse” part of the waste minimisation mantra like we really mean it. By the way, the conservation movement added the word “refuse” to the refrain “reduce, refuse, reuse and recycle”. We could also add the word “repair”, because we are very much in the habit of throwing away things when they do not work; in fact, they are made to throw away. When I was a child there was a way we could have every appliance in our house fixed, and we did. That is still a good principle. It is a principle that would also increase employment, an area into which we will have to go very soon.
We could be ahead of the crowd, and we were ahead of the crowd in our waste strategy. While Mr Hargreaves’s amendment claims that we are still ahead of the crowd, I believe that we have fallen quite distinctly behind. That indicates a lack of information about other municipalities, let alone other places in the world. ACT
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