Despite Sussan Ley’s address on plastics over the weekend at the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) Environment Ministers’ High-Level meeting, it should be noted that the SPREP is the same body the Morrison Government promised to support in 2019 when the Prime Minister made a commitment of $16 million over six years to the Pacific Ocean Litter Project. Yet according to the data available only $837,000 has been advanced so far, with no on-the-ground outcomes, and most of the expended funds paying the salary of one Australian public servant.
Read more...While the Morrison-Joyce Government fails to provide national leadership to address the waste crisis, Australians should take every opportunity to support grass-roots campaigns and state/territory government programs that aim to eliminate harmful and unnecessary single-use plastics.
Read more...If you were a free marketeer and you looked at the circumstances worldwide and in Australia when it comes to waste and recycling, you’d run through all of your hankies, having a very bitter weep, because this is a profoundly broken market, where companies produce items according to a linear model, resources get used once, they get turned into things that are often disposed of after very brief use and then they get left in our environment, and the cost falls on all of us.
Read more...The Morrison Government’s 1 July export ban on mixed plastics is in disarray after industry confirmed that Australia was not ready to reprocess additional plastics from 1 July, which means plastic may go into landfill or be dangerously stockpiled.
Read more...The export ban on 1 July means that up to 75,000 tonnes of low-quality plastic waste will need to be dealt with in Australia. That’s where it should be dealt with. But in the absence of appropriate infrastructure and the absence of end market and end market for recycled material it’s hard to see how that plastic will not be stockpiled or landfilled. And unfortunately those two basic conditions are not met at the moment. We don’t have the infrastructural capacity for the reprocessing of low-quality mixed plastic waste and we certainly don’t have the end market pull-through.
Read more...The most important task when it comes to the EPBC Act is to fix it so that we get effective environmental and heritage protection. Why? Because quite clearly we don’t have that now. After eight years, three terms, of this government we have a failed environmental protection system which is leading to animal extinctions. It’s leading to coral bleaching. It’s leading to marine heatwaves. It’s leading to the destruction of ecosystems around this country.
Read more...Minister, in your speech to the Press Club, you accused your opponents, which presumably includes all Australians who rightly want to see proper protection of our environment, of being too focused on activism rather than outcomes. Isn’t it the outcomes that are the problem? Isn’t that why people are moved to activism? Minister, when are you, as the Minister for the Environment, going to exercise that responsibility rather than being an apologist for a government that has presided over serious and steepening environmental decline?
Read more...World Oceans Day is an opportunity to remember that the oceans are the lungs of our planet and they sustain biodiversity that is essential to life on earth.
Read more...All of us who get to argue in this place for environmental and heritage protection know that we do so on the foundation that is laid through community activism—local people, traditional owners, action groups, preservation societies, history buffs, bushwalkers, artists and amateur naturalists, one and all. It is local people who make the case for protecting the things we will share.
Read more...Evidence obtained in this week’s Senate Estimates again shows the Grand Canyon that exists between announcement and delivery with the Morrison Government, this time with a new instalment of inaction when it comes to tackling Australia’s plastic waste crisis.
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