Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and others

The majority voted in favour of disagreeing with the amendment moved by the MP for Fremantle Josh Wilson (Labor), which means it failed.

MP Wilson explained that the amendment:

... picks up the broad question of whether the newly created minister's priority list will be effective in dealing with some of the most harmful and most disappointingly unrecycled types of waste. There's plenty of evidence that a listings mechanism, which encourages a voluntary response from an industry or group of producers, has been pretty ineffective to date. Packaging is a very good example of that. That's why this amendment proposes to put packaging back on the minister's priority list from the outset.

Motion text

(1) Clause 67, page 67 (after line 21), after subclause (1), insert:

First priority list must cover packaging

(1A) The Minister’s priority list that the Minister is required to publish under subsection (1) before the end of the financial year ending on 30 June 2021 must include packaging in the list of products referred to in paragraph (1)(a), and set out information as required under paragraphs (1)(b), (c) and (d) in relation to packaging.

(1B) To avoid doubt, subsection (1A) does not prevent the Minister’s priority list from including products other than packaging.

(1C) For the purposes of this section, packaging includes:

(a) a container, wrapper, confining band or other thing in which a good is packed, or 2 or more goods are packed; and

(b) anything around which a good is wound or wrapped, or 2 or more goods are wound or wrapped; and

(c) a container that is designed to contain a liquid for human consumption (whether for the purposes of transporting or storing the liquid, or for the use or consumption of the liquid).

What do these bills do?

The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 was introduced with several other related bills to establish a framework to:

• regulate the export of waste materials, in line with the agreement to ban the export of waste plastic, paper, glass and tyres by the Council of Australian Governments in 2020;
• manage the environmental, health and safety impacts of products, in particular those impacts associated with the disposal of products; and
• provide for voluntary, co-regulatory and mandatory product stewardship schemes.