Two years ago, nearly two-thirds of “recyclables” Victorians dutifully placed in their yellow-topped bins ended up in landfill.
Popularised by the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle”, there remains a widely held belief that most of the bottles, boxes and bits of plastic that end up in Victoria’s “resource recovery” waste stream are reborn as new products churned out of local factories. That self-fulfilling loop is correct, up to a point.
And what couldn’t be sold overseas or processed began to back up in massive stockpiles in warehouses and industrial yards, to await processing or price changes in the market.The realisation that the sector had in fact become a public health and environmental catastrophe in waiting literally exploded into the public consciousness in July 2017,
“You had what were meant to be bales of recyclable plastics or whatever, and they’re oozing with baby’s nappies and tampons and needles. We ended up up to our knees in water filled with every unimaginable, horrible thing.” For years, China and other developing nations had bought recyclables from Australia considered too contaminated or expensive to be processed into a form that could be reused.