Lithium-ion Battery Roundtable

Ms THOMPSON (Davenport) (14:40): My question is to the Deputy Premier. Can the Deputy Premier provide an update to the house on the recent South Australian government-led lithium-ion battery roundtable?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water, Minister for Workforce and Population Strategy) (14:40): Lithium-ion batteries are incredibly useful, obviously, but also extraordinarily challenging, mainly because they so easily under certain circumstances set themselves on fire, and it's a fire that is very difficult to put out. Having heard from a number of waste facilities in particular, but also people involved in emergency services who have to respond to these fires, I recently decided that we needed to have a round table of all the relevant organisations involved, so that we could go through the issues before us and what options there might be. That was obviously very recent, and I was very glad that the Minister for Emergency Services was able to attend along with me.

What had been happening previously was that there had been work that was initiated at the commonwealth level, and is in fact ongoing, and we are expecting to hear more about that towards the end of the year at the next Environment Ministers' Meeting. That work is largely around the beginning of the process, which is the question of how we can better design materials so that it is obvious that there are lithium-ion batteries in them, and what the disposal route ought to be, and also that they are easily accessible so they are easily able to be taken out.

You find now that there are vapes, kids' shoes—the ones that have the little lighting up bit at the back—toys, pregnancy tests even, toothbrushes, bluetooth headphones, digital cameras, wireless computer devices, which are all the kind of products that have these lithium-ion batteries embedded within them and not easily removed.

Also, I would say for the Premier's benefit, when Taylor Swift came through the country there were those light-up bangles that a lot of people were wearing: they all had lithium-ion batteries in them as well. Now, my expectation is that everyone has held on to those and hasn't thrown them into the bin, but the challenge is, of course, that if you throw those into the bin, either into the recycling or into the landfill, then it is likely to end up causing a problem when they end up at the recycling facility or the landfill facility.

What we have found is that there have been an enormous number of fires—and I am just looking for the figures—some 10,000 to 12,000 battery-related fires a year. What happened in the ACT was that an entire recycling facility was wiped out by such a fire, and they don't do recycling in the ACT; they have to do it in New South Wales. That's the scale of the challenge. Of course it is very expensive for the recycling facilities. They receive these materials. In order to get insurance, which is going up astronomically every year as a result of the risk of these fires, they have to also not only pay more but put in a lot of fire-suppressant technology that is also very expensive.

It is far better for us not to have it entering the waste stream in the first place. We are working with B-cycle on ways in which we can have collection places for people to be able to come and bring their batteries to be able to be recycled and also, of course, we are working on places across Australia where those batteries can be taken and the recyclable elements of them recycled and those that aren't disposed of in a safe way.

But while it might seem a little amusing and I was teasing the Premier a little bit about Tay Tay's bangles that I think he may have a few of at home, the truth is that this is a very serious economic challenge for Australia for the materials recycling facilities but also for all of us. We need to pay attention because lives may well be lost as a result of these fires caused by these batteries and we need to be working together to find the various solutions that are required at each stage of the creation, consumption, disposal and, we hope, recycling of these products.