Plastic Problems & Blackwood Land Sale

This article was written for the April edition of the Mitcham Community News.

Plastic Problems

Plastic packaging usage in Australia is becoming an increasingly expensive problem. I certainly don’t think I am the only person frustrated at seeing produce in the supermarket unnecessarily wrapped in plastic or struggling to work out if packaging from a certain product can be recycled.

South Australia does a pretty good job when it comes to recycling plastic, especially compared with our interstate counterparts. We have also been leading the world when it comes to banning single use plastics.

A report published at the end of last year by the Australian Council of Recycling (ACoR) paints a pretty grim picture of just how much more work there is to do in this area.

It is estimated that of the 1.3 million tonnes of plastic packaging used each year, around 1 million tonnes still ends up as landfill or litter. It is significantly more expensive to send plastic to landfill than recycle it and by 2050, this is estimated to cost $32 billion dollars a year.

That is a pretty staggering figure and those costs of course are worn by you, the ratepayer.

In 2022, the popular REDcycle soft-plastics recycling scheme collapsed. While there were several reasons behind its demise, primarily there was not enough demand for their recycled product.

This is where things get quite frustrating. The ACoR report highlights that one of the key barriers to seeing a higher uptake of recycled plastic being used in Australia is cost. It is still cheaper to use brand new plastic imported from overseas, than domestically recycled plastic. This presents a substantial problem from not only an environmental perspective but also the increasing costs of dealing with an ever-increasing volume of waste.

While Council obviously manages picking up your bins and recycling, what is required here is a national response to move away from an import-consume-dispose model, to what is commonly known as the circular economy. A requirement to use recycled plastic in packaging if plastic usage can’t be avoided.

To that extent, the Australian Local Government Association is calling for a regulated, national product stewardship scheme for packaging and plastics. The estimated cost of moving to recycled packaging? Unsurprisingly, when you make something the new ‘standard’, not as much as you think, with ACoR estimating it would add 0.1% to the product cost.

Blackwood Land Sale

Council made an important decision regarding the Old Blackwood Library and Nursery site late February. The vision for this site has been a multi-storey, mixed-use development, including an activated Main Road frontage with commercial and a range of apartment sizes on top.

As legally required, the commercial nature of this issue has seen decisions made in confidence. While I did not support the decision made in late February, the community will get their chance to have a say on the proposal as part of the planning process. This will be open to everyone, not just nearby residents. A formal announcement on the future of the site is not too far away.