Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The first amendment that the Australian Greens will move on sheet 7078 is a very simple addition to the objects clause in the Products Stewardship Bill 2011 to make explicit that the scope of product stewardship legislation should rightly be:

(c) to contribute to reducing the amount of virgin resources used in products by preferencing recyclate.

I would have thought that was a reasonably commonsense thing to insert in a bill such as this to make absolutely explicit what this is about.

This bill seeks to do a number of things. In respect of the recovery of material and taking this material out of landfill, what we are trying to do here is then plug that material back into product cycles. I think there is a very well understood principle of industrial ecology or cradle-to-cradle product cycles, which says that if you are recovering valuable materials you want to then close those loops and plug that material back into the product cycle so that you are actually reducing the impact of manufacturing in the first place on the raw materials and on the virgin materials that we mine, chop down, refine and so on. So we wish to put a clause into the objects section of the bill because we believe a very important part of the whole enterprise of recycling and encouraging responsible products stewardship is that it reduces the amount of materials being drawn on to create the product in the first place. While the bill will not have a huge impact on the front end of creating the products, and I understand that is not specifically its intention, it is mostly focused on the end of pipe—it is focused on waste and what falls out of the system.

One overall, quite obvious and uncontro­versial aim I would have thought of doing this work is to impact on the way these products are made in the first place. That is obviously a piece of legislation for another day and, if anything, that is even more complex than what we are contemplating here. But I do not think that there is any harm at all—quite the reverse—in inserting a clause into the objects of the bill that at least tips the hat and acknowledges the fact that as we are in the business today in this parlia­ment of recovering materials in the first place, that those materials then be used at the front end. We are trying to encourage recycling. We believe that it should have an intent of impacting on the way that products are made in the first place, so we can take the first tentative steps in Australia towards a closed-loop economy or closed-loop product cycles.

I am happy to speak more on this perhaps once I have heard the views of the opposition and the government on this amendment, and I move Greens amendment (1) on sheet 7078:

(1)   Clause 4, page 7 (line 30), at the end of subclause (3), add:

  ; and (c)    to contribute to reducing the amount of virgin resources used in products by preferencing recyclate.

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