www.insidewaste.com.au
ISSUE 102 | JUN/JUL 2021
INSIDE 26 Councils 32 Tyre Stewardship 48 Consultants Registry
Victoria’s CDS - who’s right? Funds raised by landfill levies need to be spent on infrastructure within the industry.
State governments lack coordination over levies has pledged to up the price by $5 a year for the next few years. However, the end result is that almost one million tonnes of NSW waste heads north to Queensland every year as disposers take advantage of the state’s cheaper pricing structure. Harmonisation and portability are two popular ideas being mooted by some associations and companies within the industry to try and remedy the situation. Portability is whereby if a company takes its waste to another state it has to pay the same fee as to where the waste originated, while harmonisation is where all the states charge the same amount for disposing of waste. Tony Khoury, the executive director of the Waste Contractors & Recyclers Association (WCRA) of NSW, said the association and its members are one body that favour the portability model. “Our regulators need to ensure that the waste levy is operating as intended; that is incentivise waste minimisation and resource recovery,” he said. “Additional investment in the recycling and resource recovery sector will not only divert waste away from cheap landfill solutions, but it will create more jobs. The NSW Government recognise
this, which is why they created the proximity principle regulation in 2014. Waste levy portability across all Australian jurisdictions will ensure that the disposal of waste doesn’t gravitate to the lowest, lawful cost option. ” Suez Australia’s chief strategy, sustainability and communications officer, Justin Frank, said the company will only ever dispose of its waste in the state where the waste was generated. Even though he acknowledges cynics would argue that the company would do that anyway due to it having landfills in the state, that reasoning is only minor as to why it wouldn’t send its trucks north or south. “They are probably right [about Suez having landfills], but we wouldn’t do it anyway because it is unsustainable,” he said. “It has huge ramifications from a sustainability point of view. The carbon footprint for transportation is ridiculous when there are a number of landfills they can take it to on the way up to Queensland. The safety and transport implications, as well as the chain of responsibility implications, are not acceptable.” (Continued on page 22)
PP: 100024538
ISSN 1837-5618
LANDFILL levies are in place for a variety of reasons, with the two main purposes being to encourage waste disposers to reuse and/or recycle as much waste as possible, as well as, in theory, using the monies collected towards infrastructure that will allow the former to happen. However, there are a couple of roadblocks that many within the industry believes are stopping these outcomes from occurring. First, there is no consensus among the states as to what those levies should be, which means different states charge different amounts. The other issue is that a large amount of the monies collected from the landfill levies go in to the consolidated fund instead of towards infrastructure that would encourage recycling and reusability of items that would otherwise end up in landfill. And the latter is a real issue for the likes of NSW, which has one of the highest landfill levies in the country at $148 a tonne. Its northern neighbour, Queensland, has one of the cheapest at $75-$80, while in Victoria, it is approximately $67 (for a more comprehensive listing of levies, go to page 32). The Queensland government
THE Victorian government announced on April 14 that it had made a decision on its Container Deposit Scheme (CDS), which will follow the NSW split responsibility model where there will be network operators and a coordinator. The Victorian government took its time to develop what it considers to be the best option, with more than 3,000 submissions received and two public surveys carried out. The coordinator will be responsible for managing the finances and commercial viability of the CDS; conduct audits of the scheme to prevent fraud; pay refund amounts and collection network costs to the network operators; and report against performance targets set by the government. The network operators will establish and maintain a network of refund points; distribute refund amounts to consumers; distribute payments to refund collection point operators, and report on CDS participation and redemption rates. As with all CDS’s, the beverage suppliers will fund the scheme. According to Victoria’s Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, Lily D’Ambrosio, 85 per cent of those who were consulted over the scheme agree with the government’s decision. In a statement made when announcing the scheme, D’Ambrosio said that the community was seeking the most accessible, best performing CDS for Victoria. (Continued on page 24)
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