Page 3256 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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itself should re-engage with the whole waste reduction process. This means confronting the hard decisions. For example, it was eight years ago that the government conducted a valuable trial of organic waste collection in Chifley. But then this work stagnated. With some energy and political commitment we could have tackled the crucial problem of organic waste. The Greens are calling on the government now to actually do this.
The Greens believe that the ACT’s waste story can get back on track. We need to have the right attitude to make the right efforts and take the right decisions. In addition to embracing a better philosophy, setting better targets and re-engaging, we need to progress some new specific initiatives. Organic waste needs to be near the top of the list. Almost 50 per cent of the ACT household waste is made up of food and compostable waste. Twenty-five thousand tonnes of organic waste goes to landfill annually, just from domestic household collection. In addition to domestic organics, a further 30,000 tonnes comes from the business sector. None of that is collected for recycling.
In the landfill, all this buried food breaks down to produce methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases, 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Although the ACT’s landfill uses a methane gas capture system to convert methane to energy, these systems capture only a fraction of the toxic gases. As an aside, I also note that a private business makes money from the capture of landfill methane in the ACT. I hope that this is not a part of the reason we are not making better efforts to keep organics out of landfill.
The amazing thing is that organic waste is not even really waste. It could be processed into another valuable product—compost. Re-sequestering this organic material could reduce landfill emissions and greatly improve the capacity of the soil. Merely increasing by 0.5 per cent the organic carbon in two per cent of Australia’s agricultural land would sequester all of Australia’s greenhouse emissions. Yet we are filling our landfills with these nutrients.
Recent trials around New South Wales such as the city-to-soils and groundswell projects have demonstrated that in the right environment the public will source separate organics with very low levels of contamination. Our neighbours in Goulburn and in Queanbeyan participate successfully in this.
Many jurisdictions around the world are now recycling organic waste. Even in North America, which is often considered a recalcitrant recycler, a number of major cities recycle organic scraps. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Toronto—all much bigger cities than Canberra—collect organic waste and divert it from landfill to recycling facilities. The compost is then sold as organic fertiliser.
A second area that we need to take action in is the area of extended producer responsibility or EPR. EPR means requiring industry to take responsibility for and to better manage the waste it produces. Landfills are the graveyard of sustainability, and if we want to keep materials from them we need to manage how things are made and ensure proper product stewardship. The original no waste strategy envisaged this. This concept is often called a cradle-to-grave approach. It looks at the environmental impacts of a product beginning with the materials that comprise the product to its manufacturing, to its use and finally to its disposal.
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