A long-time advocate for plastic waste reform, Biogone and BeachPatrol Australia’s Ross Headifen says Container Deposit Schemes, while a positive step for recycling, need some refinement.
Australia is now covered by Container Deposit Schemes (CDS) providing 10-cent returns on eligible drink containers.
It has taken a long time to reach this milestone, and considerable planning has gone into designing schemes by each state government.
The schemes were warmly welcomed by BeachPatrol members – a volunteer group which has been collecting tens of thousands of containers every year from local beaches, parks and streets, and knew those numbers wouldn’t drop without a scheme like this in place.
The core goal of CDS schemes is to achieve a high return rate for bottles and cans. By recovering a large percentage of containers, the materials they contain are recognised as valuable resources that can be used to manufacture new products, thus promoting the circular economy.
Container recycling rates currently sit just over 50 per cent. To boost these numbers, each state is discussing several key ideas. These proposals include increasing the refund amount to 20 cents (which is expected to have a big impact), adding new container categories like wine bottles, and deploying more automatic Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs) to make returns more convenient for the public.
All these have merit and are important steps that need to be taken. However, BeachPatrol volunteers see a different aspect.
BeachPatrol has more than 7000 members across about 40 individual Victorian groups around Port Phillip Bay and the south coast. Each group performs a cleanup of rubbish on one of the beaches in its postcode once a month for an hour.
Their individual collection results are entered into BeachPatrol’s LitterStopper app, which records 32 commonly littered items, including glass, plastic and metal drink containers.
The app sends the data to the organisation’s website, which is available for anyone to view. This recording was started long before the Victorian CDS was introduced and has monitored the results since its inception.
BeachPatrol figures show a 33 per cent decline in littered containers over two years. Arguably this could be due to the areas that the organisation cleans being outside or away from home locations, which would have a higher littering rate.
What is of more concern to BeachPatrol is the efficiency of returning containers. The more difficult it is to return containers, the less the public will be inclined to participate, hence fewer resources recovered.
Private scheme operators run the public-placed collection points and deliver the collected containers to recycling hubs. Most of the return points are automatic RVMs which scan the barcode of returned containers and credit the depositor 10 cents for every container.
There are no operators on site. The containers accepted must be ‘eligible’ containers, which means they must be in good condition for the machine scanner to read the barcode on the container. Otherwise, the RVM rejects it.
This is a large problem for organisations like BeachPatrol collecting littered containers from the open environment.
Up to 50 per cent of the containers collected can be bleached, are missing labels or are crushed. These will not go into an RVM and require a manned depot where they can be manually checked and accepted. These manned depots are few and far between. Some regions are without one.
One BeachPatrol leader said:
“I have difficulty redeeming damaged containers that we pick up. By damaged it means no label on the bottle or they are crushed, and the barcode cannot be read by the automatic reverse vending machine. Currently my choices are:
(a) Drive 90 kilometres to try to cash them at another region’s manned depot.
(b) Drive 40 kilometres to try to drop them off for free (which isn’t certain) at a council tip. The council line is: “Put them in your yellow bin.” I of course, exceed a yellow bin capacity frequently.
(c) Drive four kilometres to “pay” to drop them off at the same building where a CDS depot is located.”
Other group leaders say they too are having trouble redeeming their ‘non-eligible’ collected containers.
So why is this happening?
A manned station is required to redeem non-scannable containers. The operators of return points receive funds for every container returned; therefore, it is in their interest to take as many as they can. But an operator reportedly receives six cents for each container from the scheme funds. To pay just one person $30 an hour to run a manual return point requires them to receive at least 560 containers every hour, just to pay the salary.
Now if the refund was increased to 20 cents, as some states are leaning towards, and the six cents for operators is doubled to 12 cents, 280 containers need to be returned each hour. This may work for big return centres on weekends, but probably not for other smaller places.
To successfully achieve its intended high return rates, the CDS scheme needs refinement to ensure it can accept and process damaged (non-eligible) containers. After all, a non-‘eligible’ container contains the same recovered resource value as a non-crushed one.
For more information visit: www.beachpatrol.com.au
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