Australia’s biggest consumer goods companies have told Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to impose packaging and recycling standards on the industry to ensure the rules are consistent across the states and laggards don’t benefit from cheaper costs.
“Just to make it clear, we are asking for mandates in this area,” Martinez said. “There will be some caveats … so we need to explore what the exceptions to the mandates will be.” Costco regional director Stanley Tang said: “We’ve picked up a lot of these voluntary schemes and whatnot, but having that mandated is going to be a great thing because there are hundreds of thousands of products out there and everyone’s going to be aligned.”
“With kerbside collection in particular, I can tell you getting state and territory environment ministers, who all think their system is the best system and if there’s any change the Commonwealth government should pay for it, to agree to a bit of harmonisation is not easy,” Plibersek said. “It really shouldn’t be a race to be the best, it should be a race to standardise because it just creates so much inefficiency in the system,” Merrell said. “We need rules, not guidelines – surely we’re done with guidelines?”