Let’s not fail Victorians and the environment

by Pip Kiernan, Chairman, Clean Up Australia

Under the banner of 2021 Clean Up Australia Day, tens of thousands of Victorians took to their streets, beaches, parks, bushland and waterways to remove littered and illegally dumped rubbish.

High on the list of items found were bottles and cans made from recyclable plastics, metals and glass – all of which are tradable commodities if captured before they end up in our precious environment. Unlike other mainland states, Victoria doesn’t currently have a Container Refund Scheme for these items.

This is reflected in what our Victorian volunteers collect, with the highest percentage of beverage containers in the country reported in 2020 –  7.9% higher than the national average.

We congratulate the Victorian Government for its decision to introduce a Container Refund Scheme (CRS) by 2023. We know that putting a value on these items works, decreasing the amount of litter in the environment and providing a service to the community where they can redeem their deposit.

What is vitally important now is the type of scheme Victoria implements. The best-practice split governance model relies on separating the co-ordinator of the scheme, who administers it and reports on it, and the network operator who collects the containers and provides the refund to the consumer. Their incentive is to maximise the return of bottles and cans (they earn a fee to do that), so you see collection points in places where we work, play and live and open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The parties involved in delivering this model will be decided by a transparent public tender process.

The split governance model used in NSW has recently collected their 5 billionth container for recycling in less than four years – a great outcome for the community and the environment. 

Yet in Victoria we have the big beverage companies, Coca Cola and Lion, lobbying hard under the misleadingly named ‘VicRecycle’ to control an alternative single operator scheme putting them in charge.

Beverage giants Coca Cola and Lion are the very companies which didn’t want a CRS! They spent years opposing cash-for-cans schemes in Australia. Now that a scheme in Victoria is inevitable, they are using the same tactics to convince us we can trust them with its management and operation.

It is clear the governance of any scheme for the state of Victoria should not be under the control of a single entity with too much industry influence. Rather, there should be a balance between the refund network operator/s and scheme coordinator. This split governance model guards against conflict-of-interest, whereas a single scheme model entrenches it.

Victorians have waited a long time for their Container Refund Scheme and deserve the model that best serves them and the environment. Clean Up Australia and many others from the broader community have campaigned for decades to have CRS across all Australian states and territories. Let’s not fail Victorians and the environment as we reach the final hurdle of getting this up and running.