Recycling

It is more than two years since China National Sword and the limitations on export to Asian recycling nations, kicked in. Recycling has not collapsed but it has taken some pretty big hits. So where are we up to now?

Following up on Virginia Brunton's well received "Where to with food waste" article, Mike Ritchie discusses FOGO in MUDs. Mike argues that collecting FOGO from MUDs is not just feasible, it is necessary. Getting food and garden waste out of all households will: - reduce #waste to #landfill by 50% or more - save up to 2.7% of Australia’s GHG emissions and - produce millions of tonnes of soil enhancing compost.

The waste and recycling industry contributes close to 3% of Australia’s direct emissions. However, recycling abates much more by capturing the embodied energy of the recovered materials. We can create a more sustainable Australia by reducing emissions, increasing recycling and growing new green jobs.

The Federal ban on exports of recyclables requires that over 100 new processing facilities be built to process the 1.3MT of recyclables that we previously exported. Getting approval for waste facilities can be hard, expensive and time consuming. Esther Hughes provides a few pointers for making the process as painless as possible.

One billion single use coffee cups are sent to landfill every year. Sounds like a lot but this represents less than 0.0004% of the waste generated in Australia per year. So, what can we do to deal with coffee cups so that we can focus on significant streams like organics (particularly food), which represent around 50% of all waste to landfill in Australia?

For every job in landfill we create 3 jobs in recycling. For every 10,000t of waste we landfill we generate 3 landfill jobs vs 9.2 recycling jobs. Mike Ritchie explains how recycling can help grow regional jobs.

MRA welcomes the involvement of the Prime Minister and Premiers at the 9 August 2019 COAG to resolve the many difficulties facing the recycling and waste management sector.

MRA’s Mike Ritchie was interviewed by Footprint news on the "chain of responsibility" clauses that Australian councils have started adding to their tender documents for recycling services.

Sustainability Victoria is providing a $4 million funding boost for major recycling projects that aim to increase resource recovery. These fourth round grants of between $40,000 and $500,000 are aimed at business and local governments that aim to increase sorting and reprocess priority materials.

Since Mike's article on Saving Kerbside Recycling was written, the Victorian EPA has temporarily closed down the three SKM MRFs in Melbourne, due to fire risk associated with stockpiles. Over 20 Councils have either suspended their kerbside recycling services or they are sending their recyclables to landfill.

It has now been over a year since China introduced its National Sword policy to restrict the importation of kerbside recyclable materials from the rest of the world. The purpose of the policy was to increase the recovery of domestically generated recyclables within China and further boost its own manufacturing. The new rule is a 0.5% contamination rate in Australian exported material. Few Australian Materials Recovery Facilities (MRF) were built for that level of purity.

With landfill levies in NSW at $140.20/t you would think that sorting of commercial waste would be more common than it is. Less than 5% of the Commercial and Industrial (C&I) waste in NSW is put through a processing plant to recover the valuable materials. In other words, less than 120,000t of the 5.5 MT that is generated is put through a processing plant. There are no dedicated C&I sorting facilities in other States (and landfill levies are lower).