Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the Environment. Will the minister outline to the House how the coalition government is backing in Australian jobs, protecting our environment and helping our economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic through our unprecedented recycling agenda?

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

Congratulations to you, Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a question from my friend the member for Parkes. We share a boundary several hundred kilometres long in western New South Wales, and I was pleased to join the member for Parkes to look at some recycling infrastructure a couple of weeks ago.

Recycling and the investment it brings are very much a part of the Morrison government's economic recovery. Our recycling revolution is delivering new jobs, new manufacturing processes, and, most importantly, it is protecting the environment. This billion-dollar transformation of the waste and recycling sector is diverting over 10 million tonnes of resources from landfill and creating more than 10,000 new Australian jobs over the next 10 years. Right now, we are seeing new recycling plants being built; new optical sorters being installed to reduce contamination; glass-washing facilities creating crushed glass sand that can be used again in asphalt, bricks and buildings; microfactories being piloted to remanufacture glass into green ceramics; and mobile crushers collecting single-use polypropylene waste from hospitals, granulating them on site and turning them into new plastic containers.

Through our Recycling Modernisation Fund, the Commonwealth has co-funded 78 projects to date, including 23 that are in regional and remote Australia, because we understand the important role that regional and rural Australia plays in our economic recovery. The member for Parkes knows this well. We saw firsthand fantastic examples of the innovation that comes from regional communities. The Australian Recycled Plastics facility in Narrabri is actually unique, because it is one of the few facilities that can simultaneously sort HDPE, PET and coloured plastic. It is supporting 35 new local jobs in Narrabri. It was also great to see work being done at the Gilgandra Material Recovery Facility, providing additional processing capacity for five tonnes of plastic, 20 tonnes of glass and 313 tonnes of paper and cardboard each year. These are amazing examples of regional development in important regional towns.

And we have no intention of slowing down. Waste and recycling projects supporting regional and remote New South Wales are now eligible for grants of between $10,000 and $1 million for projects that improve waste management processing and sorting. The Morrison government is backing rural and regional jobs. We are backing our unprecedented recycling agenda and we are backing our environment.