We hear a lot from governments these days about “circular economy” and “product stewardship”, even though most people have little idea of the meaning of either term*.
Reducing the environmental impacts of a product across its life cycle is the purpose of product stewardship and spans everything from design to increased re-use and recycling.
It’s an essential sustainability method with built-in financial incentives to create a “circular” flow of materials rather than one-way flow that starts with raw materials and ends in a landfill.
Both concepts were enshrined in the Commonwealth Government’s Waste and Recycling Act (2020) and are supposed to be promoted by all levels of government along different pathways from voluntary to fully regulated schemes.
A recent report by the Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence pointed to 19 initiatives across Australia which last year collected more than 366,000 tonnes of used products – from electronic products to paint and cosmetics, batteries, cans and bottles, and old sports shoes.
The best example of product stewardship in agriculture is the levy-backed and long-standing Drum Muster program which, since its inception in 1998, has recovered nearly 42 million agricultural and veterinary chemicals containers.
We pride ourselves in Australia on our clean and green primary production, but more can be done using industry-led product stewardship programs, especially in reducing tens of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste in the agricultural value chain.
The Morrison Government’s National Product Stewardship Investment Fund (NPSIF) supported some very useful work on irrigation plastics in horticulture and silage wrap in dairy.
It demonstrated the enormous potential for better stewarding non-packaging agricultural plastics across the value chain from manufacturers to farmers and on to recycling companies processing the recovered waste into useful resins.
Germany, Sweden, France and Ireland have proved ag plastic product stewardship schemes work well when there is engagement along the value chain and a price signal in place that rewards farmers for collecting and returning to collection points.
In Queensland, many farmers are keen to support recycling, particularly of micro-irrigation piping and drip tape, but the stockpiles of black plastics on farms and Council sites suggests much more needs to be done – from providing farmer education to better equipment for farm retrieval and regional collection, sorting and compaction.
Queensland has a Waste Management and Resource Recovery Strategy which, according to the Government, sets “ambitious targets to increase diversion of waste from landfill and increase recycling and [its] Queensland Resource Recovery Industries 10-Year Roadmap and Action Plan provides a framework to accelerate this transition and develop our state’s resource recovery industries”.
Action on the ground should be driven by an industry-led national stewardship scheme for non-packaging agricultural plastics.
This was proposed recently in a report to Canberra by consultancy RCMG (prepared in partnership with Queensland Fruit and Vegetables Growers) and which, if implemented, could see annually upwards of 68,000 tonnes of plastic collected for recycling.
For this to happen, the Federal Government should restore agricultural non-packaging plastics to its priority list for product stewardship and realise the potential of the good work already done.
And at the very least at the state level, there is great scope for the Queensland Government to ramp up its promotion of product stewardship initiatives as part of its action plan.
The time is right.
*An earlier version of this article appeared in the “View from the Paddock”, Queensland Country Life, Thursday 10 August 2023, p 21.
Featured photograph top of article courtesy Australian Sunlight Group Pty Ltd
Professor John Cole 