Australia needs to start recycling and reusing its own waste, says industry struggling under China's ban

The waste industry has reached crisis point several months into the Chinese waste ban, and stakeholders want immediate action.

About 30 per cent of Australia's recyclable waste is exported to China.

The industry is calling for assistance to help it transition to a so-called 'circular economy' where waste would be collected, processed and then reused to make new products here in Australia.

Recyclers say if we do not do it recycling rates will drop, causing serious environmental harm as more waste gets dumped in landfill.

Read the ABC News story by Phillip Lasker and Jenya Goloubeva - “Australia needs to start recycling and reusing its own waste, says industry struggling under China's ban.”

Shameful political response to climate policy

Two of Australia’s most shameful political failures – asylum and climate policy – are back in the news.

The Climate Institute is critical
of government inaction on
climate change.

Labor has had another stab at a climate policy – half brave, half cautious and vague, but certainly more credible than the current government’s fig leaf of a “plan”. And the PNG government has called time on the festering human rights catastrophe that is Manus Island, a development that left both parties gawpingly devoid of answers.

Each of these failures has been driven by politics.

Australian climate policy is at near crisis point because it can be solved only with a degree of bipartisanship, absent in the past seven years of brain-dead fact-free sense-paralysing conflict. Asylum policy is already at crisis point because the leading parties are in a bipartisan death lock that refuses to acknowledge the human and moral cost of achieving the stop-every-single-boat objective.

Read Lenore Taylor’s story on The Guardian - “Asylum and climate change are back in the news – and the response has been pathetic.”