Why Recycling is Essential for Australians
Mr GORMAN (Perth) (11:36): I welcome this motion. It's a wake-up call to the member's own government. The reality is that over the last 30 years, when in office the Liberal Party has been better at recycling its leaders than it has been about providing leadership in recycling waste. Today, as the motion notes, we have 67 million tonnes of waste a year, of which some 30 million tonnes is not recycled at all; it goes straight to landfill, never to be seen again and never to be used again. When it comes to plastic, we use 102 kilograms of plastic for every person in this country—each of us generates 102 kilograms of plastic in our consumption—and only 12 per cent of that is recycled. I think many people are shocked about that—I was definitely shocked, when reading this motion, to discover that only 12 per cent of the plastic that I use is recycled every year. That means my entire body weight in plastic is going into landfill each year. This has to stop; we have to do something about it.
It's not like some of the great challenges we have with the coronavirus or transitioning to a clean energy economy. We have all the technology to have a proper recycling industry in Australia right here and right now. And the next generation wants us to recycle more. Recently at his day care, my son did recycling for the week. They made little bins, they painted the recycling logo and he had a lovely time. And it was great learning; the downside is now that every time he spots the recycling logo he wants to rush to put things in the recycling bin. He will grab a full carton of milk and try to put in the recycling! I think that's a pretty good analogy for what the next generation wants us to do when it comes to recycling. They want us to get onto it and they want us to take it seriously.
My electorate takes it seriously—the electorate of Perth takes recycling seriously. I did a count: there are 23 buy-nothing sell-nothing Facebook groups in Perth, just in my electorate. These are people who are trying to find really practical community-led ways to recycle. That's a sign that people recognise their consumption is a huge driver in what we can do ourselves when acting on recycling. I will also give a shout out to two Instagram leaders in my community who do a lot in making sure that we share ways of reducing our own environmental impacts: @LessWasteKate and @treadingmyownpath. They are both great community activists who make sure they share their journey of reducing their waste.
Then you have entire social enterprises built on recycling, like Dismantle, which is all about recycling bikes and giving young people an opportunity. There's Perth College kindergarten, who wrote to me. I wrote to the Prime Minister about their desire to see local businesses use less plastic. The kids designed their own poster, with beautiful little turtles on it, and went around to all the shops near their kindergarten to put the posters up, to try to make sure that they could share their message about reducing plastics.
Then you've got the City of Vincent and the town of Bassendean, who will go from FOMO to FOGO. They have 'Food Organics, Garden Organics' bins, which will be rolling out this year and next, to make sure that we do more to separate our rubbish before it goes to landfill. The City of Bayswater have led in their desire to rehabilitate an old tip. The Riverside Gardens was the old Bayswater tip and is now a big grass patch. It's lovely. A lot of people walk their dogs there. They want to make sure that over time we can reforest that land. Their goal, to build the biggest urban forest in the Perth metropolitan area, is something I'm 100 per cent behind. Then there's the City of Stirling's resource recovery centre. You can take, basically, anything that doesn't stink there and it can be recycled. It is massive. Cardboard, fridges, televisions—anything and everything can go there. It's a great credit to the City of Stirling, what they have built. It's also a lot of fun to take your kids there. It is almost as much fun as the zoo, it's free and it's good for the environment, and it's a home to many bin chickens in the Perth electorate—it's just over the boundary but the bin chickens don't respect electoral boundaries, as many of us would know!
Finally, I'll just put a call out. The City of Perth has a mayoral election in a couple of months. The City of Perth's mayoral candidates need to get dirty. They need to get serious about waste. They need to get serious about a Perth CBD recycling plan. We will see, on 1 October this year, Western Australia finally have a container deposit scheme. I commend the McGowan government for that initiative.