Some of the most easily recycled household plastic waste — including milk cartons, vegetable oil containers and soft drink bottles — will be sent overseas for processing after a decision by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to "temporarily" exempt them from a nationwide plastic export ban.
Oatley Resources Australia has been granted a one-year exemption to export "clean and sorted polyethylene terephthalate (PET) waste plastic" to be processed and recycled into new products overseas, temporarily undoing a ban agreed to by all governments in 2020.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said the exemption had been granted due to domestic "stockpiling issues".
"The exemption was granted to make sure it is recycled and does not end up in landfill," Ms Plibersek said.
The temporary exemption will only allow PET plastics that cannot be recycled domestically, due to lack of capacity, to be exported.
Australia used to send much of its waste overseas, particularly to China, but was forced to develop a new approach when China stopped accepting a wide range of solid waste in 2018.
A staged export ban was introduced in 2020, with mixed plastic waste banned from mid-2021 and a harder ban on sorted plastic waste from mid-2022.
Just months after that ban came into force, Australia's largest soft plastic recycling program REDcycle collapsed, following revelations that soft plastics collected at Woolworths and Coles were being stockpiled for months at warehouses and not recycled.
Race to process waste
Waste companies had warned ahead of the ban that they were not ready and would have to send recyclable plastics to landfill.
That claim was dismissed by then-environment minister Sussan Ley.
"The Liberals and Nationals made a lot of flashy promises about recycling, but did nothing to deliver them," Ms Plibersek said.
"They promised 70 per cent of plastic packaging would be recycled by 2025, but we’ve been stuck at 16 per cent for years.
"Unfortunately, this means that recycling infrastructure in Australia does not meet our current needs."
Ms Plibersek said the government had committed $250 million to developing recycling infrastructure, and that 11 of the 48 funded facilities had already been delivered.
Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association chief executive Gayle Sloan said the exemption would hopefully give the industry enough time to build infrastructure to process Australian waste.
However, Ms Sloan told ABC Radio that, even with that infrastructure in place, the sector would continue to struggle to find buyers for recycled waste until regulations were introduced requiring manufacturers to use recycled Australian waste, rather than importing recycled materials.
"The time that we can deal with the plastic material that we send to our facilities is when we actually require those in Australia who are actually putting it on the shelves to buy it back," Ms Sloan said.
"People keep consuming, we keep generating this material, and we need to move as quickly to bring it back into the marketplace and use it again."
Ms Plibersek has warned that she is prepared to introduce regulations if supermarkets and plastic manufacturers do not improve recycling rates.
Greens waste spokesman Peter Whish-Wilson said successive government had failed to do what was needed to make Australia self-sufficient with its waste.
"We’ve had six years to come up with a plan to deal with our waste problem, but no government has been brave enough to deal with the elephant in the room, which is regulating plastic packaging in this country," Senator Whish-Wilson said.
"Plastic producers need to clean up their act and take responsibility for the mess they make, and governments need to enforce this through laws and binding regulations. There is nothing complicated about this, it should have been fixed years ago."
The government expects the amount of plastic waste that will be exported by Oatley Resources to decline over the one-year exemption as new recycling facilities come online.
Since coming to office, the environment minister has granted 10 exemptions for plastic exporting, typically to companies while they built or redeveloped their facilities.
However, the reasoning for this exemption was directly attributed to a lack of capacity to recycle in Australia.
Oatley Resources will be required to provide three reports during the exemption period, detailing how the waste is being managed.
