You can’t manage what you can’t measure, is a popular mantra taught to business students. But on the brighter side – if you can’t measure it no one knows what is really happening. This seems to be the preferred approach taken by many governments when it comes to monitoring our waste.
In the United States the EPA has produced a report (possibly its last!), An Assessment of the U.S. Recycling System, concluded that investment of between $36 billion and $43 billion is required to bring 82 million tons of packaging and organic material into the system per year (a 91% increase in recovery over the current level) and boost the nationwide recycling rate from its current 32% to 61%. That might sound a lot but to put it into perspective the annual budget for the armed services exceeds $800 billion!
However, when you examine the data used to come up with this number you may be surprised to find that the report is based on self-complete questionnaires from states that chose to participate in the research. Questions frequently ask for estimated percentages; these are then averaged to report on tonnage of weight collected and recycled across various categories. This implies that investment decisions could be influenced by a report that is not based on robust data.
At least the Americans have some data to go on. In Australia, if you want to know what is happening to our plastic waste there appear to be significant gaps in the data. Following the introduction of China’s National Sword policy imports of mixed plastic waste were banned. Only plastic waste that had been sorted to a high level of accuracy can now be imported into China (with other Asian countries quickly following). Australia embraced these new restrictions and signed up for the Basel Convention ban on exporting plastic waste with great fanfare.
Almost immediately the then Environment Minister, Sandra Ley, granted a licence to the largest waste-to-energy facility to export plastic waste in the form of fuel, in this case, Processed Engineered Fuel (a more palatable term for Refuse Derived Fuel or RDF), made up of shredded and compressed combustible trash including plastics and wood. This allows plastic waste to be exported as a product under a different name – so hopefully no one will notice.
RDFs are increasingly popular with cement manufacturers looking for alternatives to virgin fossil fuels. Australia is not alone here – the global market for RDF is expected to grow from US$5 billion in 2023 to reach $10.6 billion by 2033 according to Fact.MR. (Interestingly this report does not even mention plastics as an ingredient of RDF.)
So how much of this are we exporting? A simple question to answer – or so I thought. Spoiler alert – my research so far has failed to yield a definitive answer. To begin a Hazardous Waste License was required to export RDFs, in recognition of the fact that recycled plastics contain unknown quantities of a large number of chemicals used as additives to enhance their performance or appearance. However, RDF, it is argued, is a product and is therefore not waste and has been exempted from the requirements for a waste plastic export licence. We do know that we are producing at least 250,000 tonnes RDF a year, which is used, at least in part, to supply a domestic cement factory. How much of this is exported is unknown as RDFs are classified under broader export codes. It is disappointing to note that the current Environment Minister has not made any efforts to address this issue.
The reality is that Australia lacks sufficient recycling infrastructure to make a dent in the four million tonnes of plastic waste we produce each year. Where is the rest of our plastic waste going? Is it being landfilled or are we continuing to export it, in contravention of the Basel Convention – at least the spirit if not the letter. We have a right to know – we need better quality data on what is happening to our waste.