In Germany, the most successful recycling nation in the world, there’s a town that has provided services to recycle a dead dog or a deer head.
In South Korea, another champion of the circular economy, a garbage inspector may fossick through your refuse and fine you if you put the wrong thing in the wrong bag.
In Kamikatsu, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, villagers sort their household waste into 45 categories (bottle caps are sorted by colour, bottles that held soy sauce or cooking oil are separated from PET drinking bottles, and so on).
Nowhere in Australia has taken recycling to anything like those lengths, but last month Victoria announced that all residents would get a fourth, purple wheelie bin for recyclable glass, creating the nation’s first uniform statewide program. Elsewhere, local governments have created a patchwork system where the rules change at council borders.
Is this a meaningful step towards a more effective recycling system, or will it be another well-intentioned initiative that does little to reverse Australia’s poor history of waste management?
Home advantage
Australia has a series of 2025 recycling targets: 100% of packaging being reusable, recyclable or compostable; 70% of plastic packaging being recycled or composted; 50% of average recycled content included in packaging; and the phase-out of problematic and unnecessary single-use plastic packaging.
But there’s no agreed way to get there.
One part of the recycling dilemma is that it works better when items are separated early in the process, but that means bin collection arrangements get ever more complicated, and households are expected to do more of the sorting work.
Will technology one day allow households to chuck everything in one bag, and let the robots sort it out?
Suzanne Toumbourou, chief executive officer of the Australian Council of Recycling, is sceptical.
“It would be nice. I think it would probably be unlikely, at least in the near future, to have a facility that sorts everything,” she says.
“Everyone has a role to play.”
Until then, we have a hodge-podge of kerbside recycling options, and the waste that is collected streams through to facilities that have various ways of filtering, heating, screening and sorting into different streams. Some facilities can detect different types of metal, glass, plastic and paper, directing materials down different pathways.
But it still all starts in the home.
There is no global gold standard, but four-bin systems dominate some of the most successful recycling countries. A scan of the top countries shows Victoria’s planned system is common. Glass is separated, as are food or garden organics. Then there are the other recyclables (paper, cardboard and some plastics), and then a bin for everything else.
In some countries, that system is augmented by pricing plans. People get charged by the kilo for whatever they’re dumping.
Necessity was the mother of invention for many countries that excel at recycling, Trevor Thornton says.
The Deakin University hazard materials management lecturer says some of the best performers – such as Germany and South Korea – just didn’t have the space for landfill, “so they’ve had to do something about it”.
Australia, with its sweeping plains, has had a delayed reckoning with its rubbish.
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Victoria’s environment minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, says she knew something was “terribly amiss” when kerbside waste collection suffered a “significant collapse”.
In 2018, China stopped accepting 99% of the world’s recycling. Australia’s reliance on shipping its rubbish offshore was exposed as untenable and councils had to start stockpiling as they worked on a new solution.
“A lot of reforms were needed to get a system in Victoria that people could rely on,” D’Ambrosio says. “People in one part of the state had a whole set of rules, but you only had to move to another municipality to find different rules.”
D’Ambrosio says the lack of consistency made it difficult to change people’s behaviours around recycling and “led to a lot of confusion”.
Fast forward to October 2022, when the government began the rollout of the system first announced in 2020.
It’s best practice in Australia to have the four bins, D’Ambrosio says, particularly to separate out glass.
“I heard very loud and clear from industry that glass put in the same bin as paper, cardboard and plastics contaminated everything that went into that bin,” she says. The splinters not only render other materials useless, but interfere with machinery.
Toumbourou agrees that households’ work is critical.
“Separation at source is a really important part of great recycling outcomes,” she says.
“The cleanest stream you’re going to get of recycling material is when it is separated at source – and the source is householders.”
Starting a virtuous cycle
A good circular economy starts with product design, Toumbourou says. It’s better to have “monolayers”, containers with just one type of plastic, for example. Once you have more products that are easier to recycle, it’s down to consumers to “choose wisely and dispose of wisely”.
Successful countries invest in education, better pathways for recycling and innovative ways to turn waste into useful products. In many cases they convert waste to energy, a fledgling idea in Australia.
Thornton says there needs to be more focus on creating less waste in the first place, as well as efficient recycling. There’s a danger, he says, that the availability of recycling makes people complacent about consuming too much while thinking the waste will all be put back to use.
Reduce, reuse, recycle goes the mantra. But the simplicity belies the complicated economics behind a circular economy. Companies that collect kerbside waste and companies that turn it into something new and useful both need to be economically viable. That means they need a critical mass of products to be recycled, and a market to buy whatever those materials are recycled into.
D’Ambrosio says local councils obviously want to find a lower price for both collection and recycling, “no matter the outcome”.
“But at the end of the day, cheap prices led to the collapse of our system. We never want to go back there.”
If the streams coming out of households are cleaner, it’s more attractive to companies to set up facilities to receive them.
“It’s about everyone doing their bit along the whole chain,” D’Ambrosio says. “Do we really need to load up our fridges with all that food knowing we’ll throw it out? Be careful about your own consumption. Match it to what your need is and you’ll have less materials.”
Innovations around Australia are making a difference at the margins.
In Adelaide, some public bins now come with external shelving for bottles and cans that attract a 10c container deposit so that “community collectors” don’t have to rummage through rubbish to get them.
There are local programs such as Curby, where households can collect targeted materials such as soft plastics and coffee pods in a special bag, scan a QR code before they put it in their recycling bins, and follow it as it’s separated from other waste.
Work continues on enduring problems, such as recycling solar panels.
As Australia strives for a true circular economy and the ideal of zero waste, recycling will likely get more complicated. More wheelie bins, more innovation, more options. Toumbourou says robots and artificial intelligence will make recycling smarter, but households will have to keep doing their bit by sorting their own waste.
“One bin to rule them all? Probably not,” she says.