The ACT should have compulsory bottle deposit legislation, the ACT Conservation Council said yesterday.
The call follows support for deposit legislation in NSW by the Waste Crisis Network which says the packaging and soft-drink industry is supporting the “”Do The Right Thing” campaign with $1 million a year on condition that compulsory deposits are not introduced.
The executive director of the ACT Conservation Council, Craig Darlington, said container deposits were common until the 1970s when manufacturers worked out they could make more profit from non-reusable containers.
“”The only way to stop people throwing packaging and containers into the environment is to provide incentives for people to return containers and to make manufacturers responsible for the clean-up and landfill costs of excess packaging,” he said.
South Australia was the only state with deposit legislation. It got up to 97 per cent of containers returned. Elsewhere it was only 50 per cent. The council was supporting legislation proposed by Independent MLA Michael Moore for deposits.
Reusing containers reduced landfills, create local jobs cut use of scare resources.
The Waste Crisis Network said the practices of the manufacturers were being subsidised by the public which had to deal with the waste by landfill and inefficient, subsidised recyling and collection schemes. The public also had to pay for higher cost one-use containers.
Deposit legislation would be good for the country as a whole; though bad for the large soft-drink manufacturers. Single-use bottles gave an advantage to larger manufacturers and super-market operators who wanted fast turnover. Reusable bottles were more economic for smaller manufacturers.
The smaller Australian companies had been swallowed by the larger multi-national ones.
The network quoted the London-based New Economics Foundation as saying Australia was 18th most wasteful of 21 developed nations and the biggest producer of household garbage. Australians produced 55 kilograms of solid municipal waste per head than Americans
The network said local councils were having to bear the cost of waste disposal yet they had no power to introduce the single most important method of cutting waste _ compulsory deposits on containers.
In a submission to the ACT Legislative Assembly made public yesterday, the Conservation Council said voluntary clean-up and reycling schemes had been running rife in Australia since the 1970s when manufacturers moved to single-use containers. These schemes cold have an impact on the waste stream but were nowhere near as effective as deposits.
Community support for deposits was high. In 1981, six years after it was introduced in South Australia, the compulsory-deposit scheme was approved by 77 per cent in an opinon poll. Later research said 80 per cent of South Australians would like to see the scheme expanded.
All local brewers in Soth Australia and one natonal brewer used recycled bottles.
Manufacturers hd suggested that the ACT could not operate as an island. However, the South Australian experience had shown that not to be the case. Earlier legal challenges by brewers had failed.
The ACT’s 300,000-strong market would ensure it was not boycotted if the ACT had deposit legislation. Besides, NSW was considering deposit legislation.
The council said an argument put against deposit legislation was that it wold affect kerbsiderecylcing contracts, which required a specified throughput. However, no judgment cold be made on this because the ACT Govenrment would not release “”commercial in cofidence” details of the contracts. But any contract that prevented a Government from good waste management had to be suspect.