Plastic not fantastic for our precious waterways

When I announced the ban - which came into force in early May this year - the end of civilisation was predicted.

It was the same back in 1977 when Don Dunstan introduced the nation’s first container deposit laws.

This initiative meant that people received five cents for bottles, cans and other drink containers they returned for recycling.

The Dunstan scheme fuelled a recycling industry, massively reduced roadside litter, and proved a valuable fundraising tool for scouts, sports clubs and the homeless, or provided pocket money for the kids.

For more than 30 years, the scheme has been an outstanding success – with drink containers making up less than 10 per cent of South Australia’s litter, compared to 40 per cent nationally.

But still other States have not had the guts to stand up to the beer and soft drink barons, who were still predicting chaos when recently South Australia raised the deposit from five cents to 10 cents.

In the three months following the deposit increase, 153 million drink containers were handed in.

That’s 19 million more containers than were returned in the same period of the previous year.

With the plastic bag ban, there were similar predictions from some retailers about mayhem and inconvenience.

A backlash from shoppers at the check-out was also anticipated.

But it hasn’t happened.

Our polls show that the vast majority of South Australians, in all age groups, not only support the ban, but are proud of our State’s leadership.

From the beginning of May, shoppers have been using re-usable bags (green bags, paper bags or compostable bags such as those made from corn starch).

There was no chaos, and a number of retailers got in first and stopped handing out single-use plastic bags ahead of the ban.

But we’re not resting on our laurels.

Last month, we launched Australia’s first and only television and computer monitor glass recycling plant.

The plant, at Adelaide’s Gepps Cross, is expected to recycle glass from more than 300,000 television and computer screens each year.

Computer and electronic waste is building up in landfill around Australia, with up to 1.5 million computers and 1.5 million televisions nationally ending up there each year.

Historically, the disposal of cathode ray tubes from televisions and computer monitors has been a serious problem.

At Gepps Cross, CRT Recycling is taking this hazardous material and transforming it into glass that will be used all around the world, largely for making new television screens and monitors.

The company this year was awarded a State Government grant of more than $290,000 to install a glass-cutting and cleaning system.

These initiatives are all part of our Zero Waste strategy, which is on its way to reducing waste to landfill by 25 per cent by 2014.

For household waste, we’re even more ambitious, with a target to divert 75 per cent of waste from kerbside collections by 2010.

We hope South Australia’s successes in recycling will encourage other States to come on board.

Business adjusts, and there will be no backlash at the check-out, or at the polling booth for doing the right thing.