Matthew Abraham: SKM’s Wingfield and Lonsdale shutdowns show recycling is becoming a big waste of time

We all feel good about filling our yellow-lid bins but it’s pointless if we can’t ensure it doesn’t just end up being dumped in the ground, Matthew Abraham writes.

• STOCKPILE: 387 shipping containers full of recycling waste
• OPINION: China’s waste ban is a blessing in disguise
• Victorian councils scramble to stop recycled waste going to landfill

School classrooms are littered with embarrassments that really go the distance.

Let’s wind the odometer back to the ’60s and my first day of Year 7 at Christian Brothers’ College, Wakefield St, the launching pad for six years of second-rate tuition laced with first-rate fear.

Despite breezing through Grade 6 at St Joseph’s convent school at Kingswood, it’s fair to say I was on a steep learning curve in the big smoke.

Our stack of pristine exercise books troubled me so I stood and asked our teacher, Mr Sergi: “Sir, which one of these is our Busy Book?”

Busy Book? The entire class burst into spontaneous laughter. Bwahahaha! Busy Book! Bwahahaha! Adrift in this sea of hilarity, it dawned on me I’d asked a dumb question – big kids didn’t have Busy Books.

The loneliness of that moment was to become all too familiar at many a press conference as a journalist.

The Joeys had “busy books” to, well, keep us busy.

We might sketch in them or maybe write out prayers. Is this sounding a bit weird? The concept of “busy work” is well entrenched in the modern workplace – meaningless tasks assigned to workers that have little or no benefit but enable the boss to tick a box at the end of the week.

I’m starting to get the nagging feeling that our obsession with recycling falls into the busy work category.

Last week, The Advertiser’s Colin James revealed hundreds of thousands of Adelaide ratepayers must now foot the bill of a recycling crisis with the closure of SKM Recycling’s processing plants at Wingfield and Lonsdale.

Until last year, SKM had been paying councils for the paper, plastics and glass we all diligently place in our yellow-lidded wheelie bins for kerbside collection.

A MASSIVE stockpile of recycling stored in 387 shipping containers at SKM’s Wingfield site.

If we all had guilty consciences about the unbelievable waste we generate in suburban life, particularly plastic, this was the perfect get-out-of-jail card.

The more junk we made, the merrier.

Now the jig is up. Recyclers SKM shut up shop after SA and Victorian environmental agencies cracked down on its growing stockpiles of recyclables.

SKM has an incredible 387 shipping containers full of waste stacked in the open at Wingfield, like some sort of bizarre Fringe venue.

It’s worse in Victoria, where the enviro cops late last year discovered waste companies had created some 200 stockpiles of alleged recyclables.

Some of these stockpiles caught fire, spectacularly.

This “crisis” is blamed on the Chinese Government after it pulled the pin 18 months ago on accepting millions of tonnes of “foreign garbage” from Australia.

Who can blame them?

With the exception of newspapers and cardboard, aluminium cans and some glass, our recycling mania has become an expensive liability.

Environment minister, David Speirs, assured me during the week that while the “Chinese situation knocked us a bit”, things were tickety-boo in SA compared to Victoria, NSW and Queensland as we laudably divert 83 per cent of all waste from landfill.

He said he was advised by his agencies that yellow-bin recycling wasn’t going to landfill and that “we don’t have any stockpiles that would cause the industry a problem”.

So what about the inconvenient truth of the 387 shipping containers full of yellow-bin recyclables sitting at Mount Wingfield?

“I’m not sure we’d regard that as a stockpile ... of major concern,” Speirs said.

He said after the Chinese meltdown the government had given a $12 million grant for a state-of-the-art recycling plant at Kilburn that would soon not only handle all SA’s recyclables, but could import waste from Victoria and NSW.

Oh, goody. Can’t you see the new numberplate slogan – SA, the Dump State?

If companies pay us for our yellow-bin junk, it means it has a value.

Now that we are paying them to take it away, then paying them again by subsidising recycling plants, it means it’s just more trash.

Rather than giving million-dollar gifts to recyclers, shouldn’t we starve them of recyclables?

Any government could legislate to force supermarkets and other retailers to deal with their ridiculously over-packaged products at point-of-sale.

It’s worked with single-use plastic bags.

It’s an unspoken fact that the recycling game is built on confidence – if households start to think their recycling is going to landfill, the whole show collapses.

So we must trust that Minister Speirs is being well advised by his waste agencies, mustn’t we?

It is a virtuous but deluded exercise for an entire country to be whipped into a recycling frenzy by governments that pretend they’re doing something useful with our millions of plastic shampoo bottles.

Break out the Derwent pencils, this deserves its very own page in the Busy Book.