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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-09-03 Daily Xml
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Container Deposit Scheme

S.E. ANDREWS (Gibson) (14:42): My question is to the Deputy Premier. Can the Deputy Premier update the house on any changes to South Australia's container deposit scheme and any other recent actions to improve the circular economy?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Workforce and Population Strategy) (14:42): South Australia and South Australians should be so proud of what we do in recycling, and it should be no surprise to anyone that we are per capita the best recyclers in the country. We also incidentally have more solar panels on our roofs proportionally than any other state as well. We are a really green state and not to mention of course our fantastic record in electricity production from intermittent sources of renewable electricity.

But what we did in South Australia back in 1977 was we introduced a container deposit scheme. It took about 45 years for the rest of the country to start to catch up with us. Initially it was intended to deal with litter; it wasn't really about the idea of circularity. In fact, quite a lot of the materials that have been brought in as a result weren't physically able to be recycled originally, so the idea was simply: don't chuck it, bring it in somewhere so it can be dealt with thoughtfully as we used to say.

What we created was a mechanism to be able to get people to separate out certain items, beverage containers, and get them now into the recycling and the re-use stream—absolutely brilliant. Although it took them a long time, I am not surprised that the rest of the country has caught up. Now that we have a national scheme, effectively—each state has its own legislation but we are all doing it—we can now really take advantage of that to give consistency to industry.

What we have done recently in each of the states other than Victoria, which is a special case—and I can explain in detail the many, many ways in which it is a special case, but let's leave that for another time—is that we are prepared now to add the container deposit to wine and spirit bottles. This is something that the people of South Australia have wanted for some time, having consistently given feedback that they would like to make sure it gets recycled.

Anyone interested in a circular economy will want that to happen, because if you put it into a yellow top bin about 11 per cent of that glass is going to get recycled back to being used as a bottle, but if you take it out separately and take it to the Scouts, or any of the depots, it is going to be 99 per cent returned to being made into a new bottle. Glass is amazingly resilient and able to be constantly recycled back into the original product, but to get that to happen you need people to separate them out, and the container deposit is the way to do it because it creates that little incentive and little reminder.

We have joined today with NSW. We have announced that at the end of 2027 we will add wine and spirit bottles to our scheme. That is consistent with Queensland where, although they have already put it in place—50 per cent of the wine drunk in Queensland is made by South Australia, of course, because we are the best; I am just surprised the other 50 per cent is not—they are requiring labels to be in in 2027 as well. Western Australia announced in their election campaign that they are doing it, and the Northern Territory is changing their legislation. So we are starting to get a proper system across the country that the industry can rely on.

We are waiting until 2027 because we want to be consistent with the other states so that it is simple for industry. But also, having made the decision, we now want to sit down with our wine industry and make sure that it is the lightest touch, the least administratively burdensome, the least expensive possible option for them, because we treasure our wine industry and we know how significant it is for us economically and also culturally.

This is a moment to celebrate, because yet again something we led is driving behaviour change across the country and is paying off for our environment.

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