NSW’s recycling scheme a load of rubbish

HOW exactly does taxing us and creating another layer of difficulty for the consumer help councils recycle our products? Miranda Devine isn’t quite sure.

WHAT certifiable genius came up with the idea for the new container deposit scheme, aka cash for cans shambles, aka Great Big New Tax on fun?

Honestly, to add $5 to the cost of a case of beer right before Christmas has to be the biggest own goal since, well, the greyhound ban.

Some craft beer distributers say their prices could rise up to $15 per case to cover administration fees.

Talk about the Grinch who stole Christmas: Premier Gladys Berejyklian and her hapless Environment Minister Gabrielle Upton, take a bow.

Again, a NSW Liberal government is engaging in a virtue-signalling empty gesture designed to placate noisy greenies.

When people start to realise that they are being slugged 10 cents on every can of beer, water, soft drink or flavoured milk, just as the hot weather arrives, they’ll be ropeable. And then there’s the impost of turning our homes into mini-recycling depots before making the annoying trek to the closest recycling depot, which in some regional centres doesn’t even exist. If you live on the North Coast good luck finding a recycling machine less than a three-hour drive away.

For December alone NSW households reportedly are set to be slugged more than $50 million. That’s more than $20 for every NSW household.

A NSW couple inspect the Return & Earn recycling machine outside the main entrance at Taronga Zoo. (Pic: Troy Snook)

According to the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance small businesses will be hit hard, with one family-run juice business on the Central Coast facing a $75,000 bill to register every one of its products with the scheme, and that was just for December.

Another juice business, Bevco Pty Ltd, in Mudgee, of Orchy and Macquarie Valley juice fame, has been hit with a $35,000 bill. That included an $80 fee imposed by the NSW Environment Protection Authority for each type of beverage it sells, for a total of $8000.

Upton has now been forced to offer $200,000 interest-free loans to small businesses struggling to cope with the extra red tape at their busiest time, not to mention paying sky high fees.

And it’s actually having a reverse effect on the environment, with Channel Seven running footage of Return and Earn depots which have become unsightly dumping grounds where rubbish and recyclables not accepted by the new recycling machines are piling up.

No surprise that the scheme was the brain child of the nanny-regime of former premier Mike Baird, the same people who thought the greyhound ban was a smart move, until they lost the safe seat of Orange.

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With a little over 200 collection points up and running in NSW by the beginning of this month, Upton even had the hide to complain that “The rollout is a massive logistic exercise”.

So is painting your nails, if you want to complicate it.

We’d all become used to sorting out our bottles, cans, and paper and putting them in the recycling bin to be taken away by council on garbage night. It’s not our problem they can’t figure out how to recycle them properly.

The NSW Governments Cash-for-Cans reverse vending machine are being rolled out across the state. (Pic: supplied)

How does taxing us and creating another layer of difficulty for the consumer help councils recycle our products?

The cost is gobsmacking, not just financially but in nuisance value and time spent schlepping around town with a bag of leaking cans and bottles in your boot.

And it’s no consolation to hear that the state government say any unclaimed money will be given to councils. They already have too much money to waste on nanny state projects.

What family wants to turn their home into a defacto recycling depot for the government, anyway? Not everyone has a garage or oodles of space to store smelly empties. Fancy someone who lives in a third-floor walk-up apartment being told to keep their empties stashed around the place until they have time to make a special trip to get their money back.

For those people who want to keep putting their bottles in the old recycling bin on garbage night there is another potential pitfall.

“What happens if on garbage night someone comes scavenging for empties from my bin and leaves all the other trash on the footpath?” said a friend who lives in the high density inner-west.

What a joke. More fees, and more red tape doesn’t help the environment. They just make normal people antagonistic to environmental protection measures. Stop this mad scheme before it’s too late.

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