Waste Management

Dr HARVEY (Newland) (15:03): My question is to the Minister for Environment and Water. Can the minister update the house on the Marshall Liberal government's investment in our recycling sector and the benefits of a strong circular economy?

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Minister for Environment and Water) (15:03): I thank the member for Newland for his question. It was good to be up in his electorate on Monday afternoon talking about wastewater, but today we are here to talk about waste modernisation and the Recycling Modernisation Fund that is a partnership, between the state government, the federal government and private industry, to invest right across the board in South Australia's recycling infrastructure in a very transformative way.

South Australia for many decades has had an enviable reputation when it comes to high-quality waste management and resource recovery. We know that, dating back to the late 1970s, we brought in that container deposit scheme. That really changed the way that South Australians approached waste management and led to a high level of education and understanding in terms of the way we do waste management here, particularly at household levels, so we do have that reputation. A bit more than a decade ago we had the banning of the thinner plastic bags in the context of supermarkets. Then much more recently, on 1 March 2021, we had the banning of a range of single-use plastics.

We have that heritage in South Australia, and it's a great foundation upon which to build the further modernisation and evolution of the recycling industry. We know that investing and recycling infrastructure creates jobs. We know that the re-use, recycling, reprocessing and remanufacturing of waste can create up to nine times as many jobs per tonne of waste than sending it to a conventional landfill solution.

The opportunities there to create jobs are substantial, and that is exactly what the Recycling Modernisation Fund is all about: partnering with state and federal governments and partnering with private industry to see projects get off the ground. It's good for our environment, it's good from a climate change point of view because less landfill means less carbon emissions and, of course, we also benefit significantly from job creation.

The Recycling Modernisation Fund will see $111 million flow through to industry in South Australia. That will create several hundred jobs during the construction of these infrastructure projects and then in the ongoing operation of them as well. We have been able to see funding distributed right across metropolitan Adelaide and into the regions too.

A snapshot of some of those projects includes nearly $8 million for the Northern Adelaide Waste Management Authority to process more than 40,000 tonnes of fibre from paper and cardboard per year, really lifting the quality of fibre recycling and reprocessing here in South Australia so that that can be much more like a commodity, rather than the contaminated waste that it is at the moment; and $8 million towards the Aurora Group to recycle and produce high-quality glass containers like wine bottles. South Australia is the premier manufacturer of wine bottles in Australia because of our large penetration of the wine sector here, and so the wine sector is hungry for more recycled content, and that's what that project will do.

There are more and more projects right across the city, right across the state, contributing to enhancing and investing in our recycling. It's good for our environment but particularly good for job creation here in South Australia as well.