Make your voice heard when Federal Parliament votes on waste and plastic pollution law
Step Up; join us to tackle packaging and single use plastics in Australia
This year’s final session of Parliament is voting on a new law to stop the export of waste and enact better product stewardship laws. It’s a big opportunity to tackle packaging and single use plastics.
We're working with the Boomerang Alliance, asking you to Step Up and make your voice count. By hitting the button below, in one easy step you can email key MPs and help make a difference.
On 9th November the Commonwealth Senate will debate a Recycling and Waste Bill 2020 designed to stop exports of waste to other countries for 'recycling'. This is a positive policy that should prevent Australia exporting its waste and promoting more recycling in this country.
However the bill can potentially also introduce amongst other things, new measures to reduce single use packaging. We know that you and many other Australians agree that this is important. The problem is that once again the Commonwealth is endorsing targets
to reduce plastics, and then leaving it to the packaging industry to achieve these voluntarily.
The packaging industry promised to reduce its plastic packaging and waste in 1999. For 21 years now they have been making promises. According to the industry* in 1999 the plastic packaging recycling rate was 20%, in 2018 it was 16%. That's just not good enough.
We think it's time that the agreed packaging targets were made mandatory. Join us to make your voice count.
National labelling for reusable, compostable or recyclable packaging should mean all packaging is eco-designed, efficiently collected and then recovered in practice everywhere in Australia.
Step Up and support amendments that strengthen the proposed bill:

*National Recycling and Recovery Survey (NRRS) 2014–15 for plastics packaging-APC
Australian Packaging Consumption & Resource Recovery Data 2019-APCO
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