Rick Ralph helped build the national foundation for resource recovery in Australia. After five decades of advocacy, the time has come to pass the baton to the next generation.
Forty-six years ago, the waste and recycling sector in Australia barely existed outside of landfill operations and scattered charity drives. It didn’t have a unified voice, a national agenda, or a clear public identity.
To follow the career of Rick Ralph, the outgoing chief executive officer of the Australian Resources Recovery Council (ARRC), is to chart the industry’s evolution from a fragmented service to a national necessity.
His career is one of longevity and depth of impact, thanks to a product that defined an era.
Rick entered the sector in 1980, based on a single phone call asking him to get involved in a fledgling scheme. The challenge was organising the recycling stream for a revolutionary new product: the aluminium can.
Rick was instrumental in establishing the world-renowned “Cash for Cans” program, an informal and state-based system where people could collect and return aluminium cans for cash – a precursor to modern container deposit schemes (CDS).
“The introduction of the aluminium can in Australia disrupted a normalised beverage packaging market and fundamentally reset Australia’s environmental policies,” he recalls.
“It changed the dynamics of packaging, forced the introduction of the plastic bottle by the beverage sector and became a pivotal point for lightweight packaging and transport.”
He says that at its height, the voluntary scheme achieved a 65 per cent recycling rate across Australia, a number that many current CDS are still chasing today.
The success was driven by community – at one stage, there were more than 2000 formal community groups actively collecting cans, using the funds to purchase ambulances, install playgrounds, and carry out myriad philanthropic activities.
This initial success led to Rick’s involvement with broader environmental movements like the Tidy Beaches and Tidy Towns programs, working with organisations such as Keep Australia Beautiful, and in 1983 helping to establish what is now known as ACOR (Australian Council of Recycling). For 15 years, Rick was driven by an unwritten challenge: getting every single can back and driving recycling policy reforms.
After spending time in various roles, including establishing the scheme in South Africa and then a stint running the Brisbane City Council’s waste business, Ralph for a short while owned and operated a materials recovery facility, then became involved in Australia’s first pyrolysis gasification plant trial – a waste-to-energy concept – in the early 2000s at Wollongong. He has been an advocate for harnessing the calorific value of residual waste ever since.
He remains a big supporter of alternate waste technology because, as he reasons, if everything of residual value has been extracted from a bin, there remains a chunk of material with no home other than a hole in the ground but which possesses inherent calorific value.
“Why are we not harnessing that calorific value?” he asks.
“It defies belief that we’re having this philosophical discussion now, and everyone’s saying we’ve got a landfill crisis. Well, yes, we have, largely driven by politics focused for far too long on chasing the zero-waste myth.”
The second great turning point in Rick’s career arrived in 2006. With government policy increasingly active in the waste space, Rick and several industry colleagues recognised what he calls a dangerous gap: the operational sector lacked a cohesive, independent voice.
This led to the formation of the nucleus that became the Waste Recycling Industry Association in Queensland, followed by the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. In 2017, with long-time industry stalwart Max Spedding (also now retired), he established the National Waste and Recycling Industry Council, now the Australian Resources Recovery Council.
“There was the realisation of the importance of industry having a strong, independent representative voice to protect its interests at the federal level,” he says.
This culminated in what Rick considers one of his greatest career highlights in 2024: achieving a formal disallowance motion in the Senate rejecting the proposed rule to charge companies $13,000 for every variation made to a commodity export, as well as having the government reject in the same year a budget proposal for a $4-per-tonne “recycling tax” on the yellow bin.
Those achievements were the result of three years of “damn hard work”, demonstrating the importance of having a strong non-partisan industry presence in Canberra.
Looking back, Rick says the constant state of flux and change is what kept him hooked.
“I think once you’re part of the industry, you find it difficult to leave it,” he jokes. “You always come back to it.”
He attributes his success, achieved without any formal tertiary qualifications, to building powerful networks. Yet, for a veteran who has navigated every policy tide, the current landscape presents distinct challenges.
Rick points to what he calls now a “fundamental disconnect” between federal and state policy settings, which creates confusion and uncertainty. He says the Federal Government’s efforts should be focused not on setting arbitrary waste reduction targets but on harmonising language, definitions, and cross-border standards.
“This notion about having recycling targets is a myth. You should be chasing the objective, and if you execute that properly, you’ll get your targets and more,” he says.
Rick contrasts this with the old voluntary systems that chased maximum recovery rather than simply hitting a figure.
Another change is the rise of “white noise” in the policy arena, which he believes disrupts sensible policy settings. He says the current system of stakeholder engagement has become just a “tick and flick” exercise and lacks the collaboration between industry and government he experienced early in his career.
After a business career of 51 years, 46 in waste and recycling – spanning both international and public/private sectors – Rick is ready to step back. At 70, he acknowledges that the time for retirement is now.
“I’ve got to be realistic that there are more sunsets ahead of me now than there are sunrises. So, I’m going to do ‘stuff’ that I want, including stepping completely away from the advocacy world,” he says.
While he will maintain some business interests to keep the brain active, beyond that, he has “no plans”.
“It’s time that the next generation now put their signature on the sector,” he says, adding that he is delighted with his successor, Haydee Forster, who brings more than 28 years of executive experience in waste and resources recovery, governance, safety, and systems management to the role, including senior federal government experience.
For a career built on shaping the environmental consciousness and political representation of an entire industry, how does Rick sum up his contribution?
“I hope I’ve left our industry in a better place than when I came into it with its own separate identity. More importantly, my contribution leaves our planet in a far better place for my grandchildren to enjoy and the generations that will follow.”
