Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the Environment. Will the minister update the House on the Morrison government's stable and certain approach to reducing Australia's waste and increasing our domestic recycling capacity?

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for North Sydney for his question because I know he's a really strong advocate for the eradication of plastic in our waterways. On this year's Australia Day he joined the 1st North Sydney Scout Group cleaning up litter at Berrys Bay. It is, indeed, often the case that young people—children in our schools, students—are the ones who are leading and seizing the opportunities that recycling brings. You only have to visit schools, as we all do, and talk to students. I was at St Paul's College in my electorate at Walla Walla recently and the canteen had five bins, all carefully labelled and all used perfectly. It's the students who understand the challenge that we face nationally and internationally in recycling. It's the students who will talk about the island of garbage in the Pacific, which is 1.6 million square kilometres in size—three times the size of France—and accumulating daily. It has 80,000 metric tonnes of plastic.

I look forward to the Morrison government's strong agenda on recycling because Australians care deeply about recycling and they want to be confident that, when they put things in their recycling bin or deliver them to a collection centre, those things will be repurposed effectively and not dumped in landfill or sent overseas. Every Australian generates nearly three tonnes of waste a year, 42 per cent of which is thrown away. This needs to change. At the recent Council of Australian Governments, the Prime Minister led conversations with the states that will lead to Australia banning the export of plastic, paper, glass and tyres. We would like to see that from next year. I will meet with ministers at the environment ministers meeting later this year and we'll sort the timetable and set the targets. We're moving from a national waste action plan from last year to the targets, to the delivery and to actually making this a reality. I mean, 123 local government areas, mainly in rural and regional Australia, have only one collection point. These are the sorts of things we can discuss with our state colleagues.

This commitment reflects the national priorities that we came to government with at the last election. We have a $167 million recycling investment plan, but it's just the start. The Morrison government is leading substantial investment to transition us away from a linear economy of take, make and waste to a circular economy of reuse, repair, refurbish, remanufacture, recycle—a generational transformation in our recycling industry.