Big business calls on government to police tide of plastic packaging

Australia’s biggest consumer goods companies have told Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to impose packaging and recycling standards on the industry to ensure the rules are consistent across the states and laggards don’t benefit from cheaper costs.

At the 2024 Recycling Roundtable on Friday, jointly hosted by this masthead and Visy chairman Anthony Pratt, some of the biggest players in the fast-moving consumer goods sector including Nestle, Unilever, Lion and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners made a clear call for mandates.

(From left) Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, Nestle Oceania chief executive Sandra Martinez, Visy chief executive Mark De Wit, Merri-bek Mayor Adam Pulford during the 2024 Recycling Roundtable.Credit: Louise Kennerley

Nestle Oceania chief executive Sandra Martinez said she supported imposing standards around packaging and use of the Australasian Recycling Label, and ensuring consistency of waste collection between the states and territories.

“Just to make it clear, we are asking for mandates in this area,” Martinez said. “There will be some caveats … so we need to explore what the exceptions to the mandates will be.”

Unilever ANZ head of country Nick Bangs said inconsistent laws across Australia stifled innovation. For example, if Unilever wanted to use more recycled content in aluminium cans, it would need to import recycled aluminium because of the lack of local consumer recycling.

“If you’re in Victoria, you can put your aerosol cans in the kerbside bin, but if you’re in the rest of Australia you can’t, so we’re losing this huge opportunity to create … recycled aluminium,” Bangs said.

Costco regional director Stanley Tang said: “We’ve picked up a lot of these voluntary schemes and whatnot, but having that mandated is going to be a great thing because there are hundreds of thousands of products out there and everyone’s going to be aligned.”

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s third annual Recycling Roundtable event with Visy and Anthony Pratt (far right).Credit: Louise Kennerley

Visy chief executive Mark De Wit said a strong recycling system required a market to buy the recycled material, and that required government intervention.

“In some cases that [recycled] material can be more expensive than virgin material, and unless there are mandates, it’s just not going to be used,” De Wit said.

Visy has a stake in the debate as a dominant player across the supply chain, with recycling collection, processing and packaging operations.

Plibersek has been threatening to introduce recycling and packaging regulation since 2022, but is yet to do so. She told the roundtable that getting state and territory governments to agree was difficult.

“With kerbside collection in particular, I can tell you getting state and territory environment ministers, who all think their system is the best system and if there’s any change the Commonwealth government should pay for it, to agree to a bit of harmonisation is not easy,” Plibersek said.

The issue was discussed at the national meeting of Australian environment ministers in June, and it is expected that governments will release advice to industry by the end of 2024. In late November, Australia will be part of United Nations talks in Korea pushing for a global agreement to prevent plastic pollution.

Australia has a target of 70 per cent of plastic being diverted from landfill by 2025, but based on 2021-22 figures, it is still sitting at 20 per cent.

(From left) Diageo managing director Dan Hamilton, Lactalis Australia chief executive Malcolm Carseldine, and Unilever ANZ head of country Nick Bangs at the roundtable.Credit: Louise Kennerley

Justin Merrell, the group environment director for beverage giant Lion, said harmonisation was more important than getting a perfect system, pointing out that for his company to put out a new beverage on the market, it would have to register it in seven different recycling schemes, each with different monitoring and compliance requirements.

“It really shouldn’t be a race to be the best, it should be a race to standardise because it just creates so much inefficiency in the system,” Merrell said. “We need rules, not guidelines – surely we’re done with guidelines?”

Peter West, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners vice president and general manager Australia, Pacific and Indonesia, said mandating businesses to separate their rubbish was an important part of the picture, especially for a business such as his, where half of products were sold for consumption outside the home.

Adam Pulford, the Greens mayor of Merri-bek, north of Melbourne, said local governments were working hard to increase recycling, but manufacturers needed to do more.

“The best way to deal with waste is not to create it in the first place, so industry as well as governments play a huge role in this, including mandates to remove things from the kerbside system altogether,” Pulford said.

“We believe that onus needs to be on the companies creating the products, not the people consuming it.”

Plibersek said she had spoken with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission about “getting out of the way” to allow businesses to collaborate on recycling. She said the watchdog was open to that request, and she was happy to be the intermediary if needed.

Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.