By TANIA PHILLIPS
Pic: Tasmanian Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson and Greens Candidate for Richmond Fingal’s Dawn Walker check out the hard plastic washed up on Kingscliff Beach last week.
TASMANIAN-based Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson headed to the Tweed Coast to help champion a national “cash for containers scheme”.
Senator Whish-Wilson urged Tweed Coasters to write to their local state and federal members to help pressure the NSW Government into supporting the scheme.
The senator initiated a senate inquiry on 7 November last year to examine the connection between cash for container schemes and lower levels of marine plastic pollution.
The inquiry also looked into serious allegations of beverage company misbehaviour – such as profiteering, price gouging and obstructionism.
The South Australian cash for container scheme or ‘container deposit program’ has achieved up to an 84 per cent recycling rate on all beverage containers consumed, the highest recycling rate in Australia. South Australians are very proud of this achievement – the Greens are confident a national scheme could be funded entirely from private investment, and run efficiently at a much lower cost than existing schemes.
“We know that two-thirds of all pollution that washes up on beaches is plastic and we know that a third of that is plastic bottles,” the senator, who spent 10 years working in marine conservation on the issue, said.
“They are a significant component of marine debris and we know that, from the recent CSIRO study released two weeks ago, that there was basically a four times higher chances of finding a plastic bottle on beaches outside of South Australia. This is because of a scheme that takes the bottles from the environment, from the street before they get washed into the ocean.
“Environmentally and socially the scheme makes a lot of sense.”
He said there were three reasons that the scheme had not been taken nationally, and they were all big businesses.
