The last Environment Protection and Heritage Council meeting decided the time was right for a new national waste policy. The associated target will surely have to be ‘zero waste’, given existing jurisdictional support and an underlying ecologically pragmatic need. It would also stimulate billions in much needed economic activity in the resource recovery sector. The real question is how quickly can EPHC deliver?

Matthew Warnken

The November 7 communiqué from the EPHC announced its support for the development of a national waste policy in addition to undertaking a comprehensive report on waste. Specifically, it said: “A national waste policy will provide much-needed clarity on what is appropriately dealt with at which level. It also affords a timely opportunity to revisit waste policy in the context of broader government policies on climate change and sustainability.”

This is welcome news after what has arguably been a decade of inaction on the issue of waste at a national level. In fact the last national policy on waste was in 1993 when a 50 per cent reduction in landfill by 2000 target was announced. This time around the starting point will surely have to be making Australia a resource efficient nation by setting the target of ‘zero waste’ to landfill by the year 2020. No other policy position will have any credibility, given the leadership already shown by the ACT, South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria, who have all endorsed the concept of zero waste from a policy perspective.

Support for this policy position is also provided by taking an ‘ecologically pragmatic’ view of the world. This kind of pragmatism recognises that the underlying cause of our unsustainable state is a misalignment between our systems of production and consumption and the ecology of the planet. For example, climate change is a problem because of the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The natural carbon cycle cannot cope with the level of greenhouse emissions.

Waste is also a manifestation of the same problem. In Australia we have been systematically increasing the concentration of waste in Australian land, with impacts that are only now beginning to be articulated. My estimate is that over one billion tonnes of waste have been generated in Australia between 1950 and the present, with the majority of these materials accumulating as inappropriate fill of land.

The goal of ‘zero waste’ is one key element in transitioning to a sustainable economy where patterns of production and consumption are based on the principles of nature – the ‘biomimetic economy’. For example, Janine Benyus in her book Biomimicry puts forward nature as a model, measure and mentor, citing nine key lessons regarding the operation of natural systems, including ‘nature recycles everything’. The underlying ecological reality of the planet is ‘zero waste’ and it is time that this reality was internalised into our economy.

In addition to having a sound pragmatic basis, the recovery of resources for recycling is, in and of itself, a value adding activity. The Australian Council of Recyclers (ACOR) identifies the value proposition of recycling to society as, amongst other things:
− less energy requirements for the same unit of material resource - savings in associated greenhouse gas emissions arising from energy generation through conserving embodied energy;
− avoided depletion of primary resources - extends the life of given stocks;
− replacement of fossil fuels - where the calorific value of materials are recovered for energy generation;
− nutrient cycling - through the composting and anaerobic digestion of organic materials for application to land; and
− provision of waste management services as a by-product - society still has a need to handle the bulk flows of materials that are discarded. Recycling provides this service as a by-product of recovering resource value for the economy.

Some of the changes required to deliver the sustainable outcomes of recycling include redesigning current infrastructure for waste management as an industrial ecosystem that delivers resources back into the productive economy at their highest resource value. One version of this kind of industrial ecology has been developed by the Strategic Planning and Infrastructure Group (SPIG) under the umbrella of the Waste Management Association of Australia.

Technology and infrastructure will be required to transform residual waste into its generic material types including metals, inert materials, organics/lignocellulosics (woody materials) and high calorific (energy content) fractions. These generic recovered resources can then be recycled for new metal manufacture, used for civil works, converted into soil improvement products and used as coal or gas replacement fuels respectively.

The action items to make all of these things happen under a national waste policy are relatively simple. We need a standardised waste levy across Australia, set to match the best practice level of NSW, which is increasing the waste levy by $10 per tonne per year (plus CPI) until 2015, by which time it will be well over $100 per tonne.

The second requirement is extended producer responsibility (or product stewardship) schemes to remove products or items with special value recovery potential (for example, the consumption of away-from-home containers), or with characteristics that could disrupt residual processing (for example, the recovery of all batteries, recognising that users can not distinguish between ‘safe’ and hazardous batteries).

‘Resource recovery credits’ would also maximise resource recovery of embodied energy, in addition to providing incentives for materials that are increasingly hard to recycle, such as electrical appliances with high amounts of shredder flock. Such credits reward the service provision of resource recovery, needed because the planet does not differentiate between times of high commodity prices and global financial turmoil.

Last, phase out landfilling materials with degradable organic carbon (for example, food, garden, paper and wood materials). This would prevent a 2050 greenhouse gas liability for Australia and ultimately prevent the generation of two billion tonnes of greenhouse gases.

The good news is that such action would stimulate billions of dollars in the resource recovery sector at a time when economic stimulus is greatly needed, in addition to providing a suite of actual sustainability gains for Australia in the transition to becoming a ‘recycling society’. Furthermore, much of the work around a national waste policy has already been done by ACOR and the WMAA.

The real question is how quickly can EPHC deliver and coordinate accelerated action across Australia on resource recovery?

Vantage Point columnist: Matthew Warnken is Managing Director of Crucible Carbon, a carbon management consultancy and renewable energy technology development company. Contact at matthew.warnken@cruciblecarbon.com.

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