By Casey Neill
Dandenong will be home to an $80 million recycling plant if the Victorian Greens get their way.
On Thursday 28 June the party unveiled plans to introduce a state-wide container deposit scheme and the purpose-built plant, with the South-East growth corridor earmarked as another possible location.
The Greens said the plan would create more than 1000 jobs, include strategies to force corporations to take responsibility for the plastic packaging they produced, and more.
“We need real solutions which will clean up our environment, boost our economy and create local jobs in the South-East,” South East Metropolitan Region MP Nina Springle said.
“Local councils in the South-East are bearing the brunt of China’s new restrictions on waste imports and have not been given any real alternatives; this is the solution that they need.”
But Simon Whiteley from Corex Plastics in Dandenong South said there was already well-established recycling industry infrastructure across Victoria and Australia.
“The suggestion it will creates jobs in this space rings hollow when there is already an extensive level of employment,” he said.
“A roundtable with industry would have readily confirmed this before creating such a thought bubble into a policy initiative.
“The banging on about plastic pollution choking waterways and so on is emotive and masks the real opportunity for our economy.
“The recycling principals of the three Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle – ought to be the starting point.”
Mr Whiteley said China’s recent bans on ‘contaminated’ feedstocks was “the tipping point that many have been waiting for”.
“For many years, the insatiable appetite for feedstocks saw enormous volumes of recyclate shipped off-shore and effectively starved the local industry of a feedstock for reuse locally,” he said.
