The head of Glen Industries has talked of the “crisis” facing recycling after China’s decision to cut its import of waste material from Australia.
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The enterprise’s general manager, Kylie Hawkins, said she was studying the implications. “If we can’t move our product, that has an impact”, she said.
The product Glen Industries sells is the recycled paper, glass and other stuff put in yellow lid bins by Glen Innes residents. It is sold to bigger recycling depots who are now denied a further market in China.
Ipswich City Council in Queensland has just decided to give up on recycling because the Chinese decision makes it much less viable financially. Continuing would be too costly for the rate-payers. What used to be recycled will now get dumped on land-fill sites.
Kylie Hawkins said that Ipswich’s decision had “sent shock-waves through the system”.
On January 1, China stopped accepting 24 types of waste. Kylie Hawkins of Glen Industries said that thirty per cent of the recycled material from NSW used to go to China.
With the Chinese market denied, the whole economics of the recycling industry is changed. What was profitable before may now not be and councils which fund recycling are considering the implications of that. Do they raise rates to cover the rise in recycling costs or do they give up on recycling is the broad question councils face.
Kylie Hawkins did not say what the future in Glen Innes was but she is concerned.
Glen Innes, she said, had a much higher proportion of contaminated, unsuitable items put in yellow bins by residents and that meant higher costs. In the past, she’s complained of carcasses being dumped in recycling bins.
It was important, she felt, for people to be more diligent in what they throw out for recycling.
She also thought that the state government in the form of the NSW Environment Protection Authority was working to find ways of coping with the loss of China’s market for Australian waste. She was concerned that a sudden change in the market – as happened with the Chinese decision – wouldn’t happen again, disrupting the economics of recycling overnight.
Glen Industries faces another challenge: the new “reverse vending machine” in the Woolworth's car park was taking many of the easiest to recycle cans and bottles, many of which might have gone to Glen Industries instead.