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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-07-05 Daily Xml
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Bills

Civil Liability (BYO Containers) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 16 June 2022.)

Ms HUTCHESSON (Waite) (11:02): I rise today to speak on the Civil Liability (BYO Containers) Amendment Bill. I am pleased to rise to speak in support of this bill. In doing so, I am proud to acknowledge South Australia's continued commitment to reducing single-use plastics and being a leader in this space.

The bill will enable businesses the option to allow customers to bring their own containers to take home food. This will reduce waste, while giving consumers and businesses more choice to opt in to an environmentally conscious lifestyle. This important step is one of many made by the Parliament of South Australia in recognising the importance of the principles of sustainable development in our state and the need to promote a circular economy model so we can afford future generations the same ecosystem services we currently enjoy.

Plastics are a key driver of climate change, with the materials used in the production process of manufacturing plastics consisting heavily of fossil fuels. In addition to this, the energy used to create these plastics is largely powered by fossil fuels, causing the entire global production and incineration of plastic to emit 850 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.

After their use, 95 per cent of plastic items are discarded in Australia and only 13 per cent of that is recycled. The rest ends up in landfill and on the sides of our streets or in our waterways. Left exposed, these materials continue to emit fossil fuels when exposed to solar radiation in the air or in the water, all while taking up to 1,000 years to decompose.

This bill recognises this impact and the finite nature of our resources. It also recognises the importance of giving businesses and consumers a choice in driving a sustainable future in South Australia. It does not enforce a requirement but may give businesses a financial advantage through reducing food packaging costs, while enabling environmentally conscious actions.

As a qualified chef, I understand that it is unlikely to be able to suit all businesses, hence the choice to be involved. The idea that takeaway restaurants, where customers pre-order food, will be able to accommodate them bringing their own containers is likely to be a complex one and, as such, I appreciate the volunteer nature of the bill.

Speaking to my community, I know single-use plastics are a big concern both to residents and many businesses. This issue is particularly of concern due to the high level of terrestrial biodiversity we have in my electorate, with many native animals occupying our public parks. We are increasingly aware of the impact that plastics and microplastics have on fauna, including through ingestion by wildlife and changes in animal genes. This is a significant issue in Waite, as we are home to endangered species such as the southern brown bandicoot and the square-tailed kite, showing the importance of the bill in reducing harm to our environment.

This bill will aid in putting a stop to the endless cycle of emissions and pollution from single-use plastics by enabling South Australians to partake in a more sustainable lifestyle—a transition in lifestyle which has already been enabled by visionary leadership by our state with bans on single-use plastic bags, straws, cutlery and stirrers, as well as several polystyrene products. Our consumers' diminished dependence on single-use plastics is increasingly important with the ecological threats we are facing. I welcome the community embracing this change.

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (11:05): I rise also in support of the Civil Liability (BYO Containers) Amendment Bill. Locals in the Adelaide electorate are incredibly passionate about the environment and acutely aware of the important role we can all play in reducing our individual impact on the environment in diverting plastics and food waste from landfill.

In many homes in my community, you will find kitchen caddies on kitchen benches and schools practising 'nude food', which is a term to describe packing lunch boxes with items that are not wrapped in Glad Wrap or are not pre-packaged. Every weekday you will find colourful ceramic and glass keep cups that have become a regular part of the daily coffee grind.

I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge locals in my community for their efforts, along with the many cafes, restaurants, schools and community groups that strive towards and encourage environmentally friendly choices and practices.

I want to single out one business in my electorate, that is, the Let Them Eat cafe in James Place. I was a regular to Let Them Eat when it was based in the Adelaide Central Market Arcade, when I lived in the city, and I would often visit there with my baby daughter, Audrey, and was always impressed by this small business's efforts in their campaign towards sustainability. These efforts were rewarded yesterday when Let Them Eat became the 42nd SA Plastic Free Champion. It was incredibly timely, given that we are currently in Plastic Free July.

This amendment bill is another important step towards supporting businesses like Let Them Eat to reduce the use of single-use items and food waste in South Australia. The bill will allow customers to bring their own re-usable containers to businesses like Let Them Eat to other cafes and supermarkets to take away food or package it up and transport their food home. It provides another layer of protection for these businesses by acknowledging that the liability for anything that goes wrong with the food purchased and transported in a BYO container will be with the customer of that business. Importantly, this means that businesses will not assume the liability themselves.

I do acknowledge that there are exceptions to the above rule—for example, if the business acted in bad faith or the person selling the food was aware the food was not fit for consumption or subject to a food recall order. It is also important to note that businesses could choose whether or not they would allow their customers to use bring your own containers. This bill simply provides the option; it does not impose a requirement on businesses. But I do expect that if the passage of this bill is successful through the house, we will see businesses in my community embrace the option because we know South Australia has been a national leader in this space.

In 2009, we were the first state to implement a ban on lightweight, check-out style plastic bags. In March last year, we were the first state to ban single-use plastic straws, cutlery and stirrers. This ban extended in March this year to polystyrene cups, bowls, plates and clamshell containers.

In April this year, I had the great pleasure of joining our Deputy Premier and Minister for Environment, Dr Susan Close, at my local Woolworths in Walkerville to announce that we were the first state in Australia to have 100 per cent certified compostable bags in all our Woolworths stores. These bags replace the single-use plastic fruit and vegetable bags and can then be used in your kitchen caddy to collect your food scraps. It is these initiatives, combined with legislative changes like this bill, which provide clever and convenient ways for our community to divert plastics and food waste from landfill and build on our reputation for nation-leading environment policy.

I look forward to breaking out my finest Tupperware and bringing it along with me to my favourite local eateries and supermarkets in my electorate following the successful passage of this bill. I commend the bill to the house.

Ms THOMPSON (Davenport) (11:09): I rise to offer my support for the civil liability amendment bill presently before the house. We know that food packaging waste carries an enormous cost for our environment. The production of food packaging uses a significant amount of water and emits greenhouse gases that are destructive to our environment. Often, people will prioritise convenience over sustainability, making food packaging one of the worst contributors to Australia's waste stream. Single-use packaging contributes to enormous quantities of landfill, with one billion disposable coffee cups alone ending up in Australia's landfill every year, not to mention them ending up in our waterways and on our coastline.

A few years ago, most of us would not be caught dead carrying around a single-use coffee cup; in fact, we would often be shamed by our peers for reckless disregard of the environment. Most people would have a collection of carry cups at home for their morning coffee. It did take a little while for people to learn these new habits of grabbing a re-usable coffee cup as they headed out the door on their way to work, but we did see a huge change in behaviour, and the campaign to encourage re-usable coffee cups and other packaging items was certainly gaining momentum. Millions of single-use coffee cups were diverted from landfill as more cafes jumped on board, even offering discounts to their customers who brought their own coffee cups along.

Unfortunately, COVID and other perceived health risks put a stop to this. For good reason, we stopped bringing our containers from home. This was to protect ourselves, but it was also because there was too much liability for our businesses. The Civil Liability (BYO Containers) Amendment Bill will permit consumers to bring their own re-usable containers into businesses for their takeaways. In effect, the liability for anything that goes wrong with food purchased and transported in a BYO container will stay with the consumer. This means that businesses will not assume the liability themselves and they can embrace these campaigns to encourage people to bring in their own containers for use.

As we just heard from the member for Adelaide, South Australia has been a national leader in this space. We were the first state to implement a ban on check-out style plastic bags back in 2009, and I acknowledge our former government for ensuring we were the first state to ban single-use plastic straws, cutlery and stirrers in 2021. This year, we have expanded the ban to polystyrene cups, bowls, plates and clamshell containers. This bill is an important step towards reducing the use of single-use items.

I would encourage anybody who has not had a chance to visit their local waste and recycling centre to do so. I am a big fan of the Seaford waste and recycling centre that was launched just last year when I was still involved with the Onkaparinga council. That centre services the City of Onkaparinga and Mitcham and Marion. It is quite incredible to see the huge amount of unnecessary packaging that comes through those doors and also the hard work of those who work in our waste and recycling streams, who work extremely hard to divert as much as possible from landfill.

I would like to congratulate Greens MLC Robert Simms on introducing this amendment bill to the Legislative Council. The cost to the environment of single-use items cannot continue to be ignored if we want to properly address climate change. We need to protect our environment, but we need to protect our businesses too. I commend this bill to the house.

Mr TEAGUE (Heysen) (11:13): I rise to support this bill. I do so briefly to indicate this reflects work done by the previous government. I acknowledge the work of the former Attorney-General in this regard together with the good work of the Hon. Robert Simms in the other place. It was work that was advanced to a point of readiness; indeed, it was on its way to passing this place in the previous parliament, with the goodwill and cooperation of all concerned, among a number of priorities at the end of the last parliament.

In a sense, if there was any legislation that was anticipated for commencement early upon our return, it was this legislation. In commending it briefly, I want to indicate that, in the context of what the leader did in the course of his previous ministerial capacity as Minister for Environment in bringing about the structure through which we will progressively do away with single-use plastics in this state and continue our state's leadership, in terms of reducing the amount of hazardous and otherwise recyclable material disposed of to waste—going all the way back to our early introduction of the container deposit scheme through to Minister Speirs, as he was, introducing the former government's initiative to phase out single-use plastics and to continue that phase-out via a structured process through cooperation with industry and the steady substitution of better products in place of those single-use plastics—we will see that progress further and further over the years to come.

This piece of legislation in some ways is a neat corollary, in terms of day-to-day life, to say that we are focused on reducing the extent to which we have a culture of single-use, a culture of throwaway and a culture of consumption, and that instead we are moving to one in which we are conscious of the materials used in the products in which we have our takeaway food and drink, and, even more so, we are making choices consciously about the use of cups (I expect predominantly for the purposes for this act) and the materials that go into those cups and so on that we use repeatedly.

Pursuant to this legislation, I think it will now be a change of culture that we will see. We will not have a focus on a reticence that will be required from retailers to accept a bring-your-own product for fear of incurring a civil liability but, rather, culturally a move to embracing the use of these materials, the use of re-usable materials, as a matter of course.

Reflecting briefly in a comparative way on the culture of re-use, it is all very well to think about materials that can be recycled. The recycling industry will, generally speaking, bring the product back down to its component parts and then use that material to manufacture another product. It is not always that way. A comparative form of re-use we have seen in different parts of the drinks industry, particularly overseas—and it is one I lived through day to day in Sweden—is the use of a thick plastic bottle that would be returned to the place of purchase, washed and then refilled. The bottle that you bought off the shelf often bore the marks of having been through the wear and tear of multiple uses. It would be relabelled and put on the shelf having been washed, but it was all scratched up and showing that it had been used several times.

When we talk about recycling and re-use, it is not only a matter of reducing the litter and bringing products back to a recycling facility that can, as it were, boil them down to their component parts and rebuild, it is also very much about saying, 'Think about the materials that are in the products you use because it can be that that particular product can be re-used.' In this case, in a retail context we are now going to make it easier for the retailer to facilitate that because they will not have the associated fear of incurring civil liability, provided they do so in a sensible way.

This is a good measure, in line with other initiatives that were taken over the course of the last parliament by the previous government. I commend in particular the former Attorney-General and the Minister for Environment, as he then was, and now Leader of the Opposition in this place for this bill returning here. I commend its hasty passage through this house.

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (11:21): I also rise in support of this bill. It is a step. It is a small step, but it is a step nonetheless. To put it in some context, at the moment 11 million tonnes per year of plastic is being discharged to the marine environment. That is expected to massively increase over the coming years, with the estimate that, by 2040, 20 million tonnes of plastic will be discharged to the marine environment. That represents 50 kilos for every metre of coastline globally—that gives you an indication of the scale.

The big companies involved in plastic manufacturing have all flagged very significant increases in plastic production. We have a huge problem on our hands, the full scope of which we do not fully appreciate and the consequences of which we do not have full sight of. Time will tell. These are small steps. They are important steps, but they are small steps, and we should not lose sight of the fact that we have a major, major problem.

Ms CLANCY (Elder) (11:22): I rise today in support of this bill. How often have we all gone into a supermarket and had that moment—I do not know if you have done this, member for Hammond—when you need to buy some olives and you think, 'Well, do I buy a container at the deli and get another single-use plastic, or do I buy a jar?' and have that little moral dilemma of, 'Is glass worse for the environment because of all the energy put into making the glass to then put the olives in?' It is exciting to be able to have this flexibility where I can take one of my Tupperware containers and get it.

It also really mixes up our Friday nights. At the moment, normally on a Friday night as often as we can—when I am not busy at a Kenilworth Football Club trivia night—I am at home with my family and we have our movie and takeaway night. Do you know what we get every single Friday because we are worried about all the plastic containers if we get anything else? We get pizza because at least we can put the box into a green bin. So I am pretty excited that we are going to be able to mix up our Friday evenings, finally.

I want to thank the Hon. Robert Simms in the other place, who introduced this bill, and Deputy Premier Susan Close, in her capacity as Minister for Climate, Environment and Water, for introducing the bill in this place. This piece of legislation is sensible, good for consumers, good for workers, good for business and good for our planet.

Our land and waterways are being choked by billions upon billions of pieces of plastic waste. Australians are using 130 kilograms of plastic per person per year and recycling less than 12 per cent of it. It is pretty dire. Not only is all this plastic endangering our marine wildlife but the University of Newcastle recently discovered that most people are consuming up to 2,000 tiny pieces of plastic every week as a direct result of our own pollution. I think the member for Adelaide's face is appropriately disgusted by that fact.

South Australia has a proud history of being a nation and often a global leader in environmental protection and action on climate change. In 2009, we were the first state to ban plastic bags and, from March last year, we completely phased out the use of single-use plastic straws, stirrers and cutlery. We must continue to build upon this legacy, demonstrating the power of government in protecting our environment and combating climate change, while also encouraging individual consumers, workers and businesses to make environmentally positive choices without impacting their cost of living.

This bill will allow consumers to bring their own containers to purchase food—like olives—and reduce our reliance on disposable food packaging. The liability for bringing such a container will sit with the consumer rather than the business, ensuring that businesses that act in good faith and best practice will be exempt from any associated liability if something were to go wrong as a result of the BYO container. This shift in liability provides workers and businesses with the confidence to allow their consumers this choice, reducing business costs and encouraging less and less usage of single-use plastics.

Whether or not you are picking up a favourite breakfast roll or avo on rye from Our Food Project in Daw Park or a big brekky roll or nasi goreng from Sublime Cafe in Clarence Park, so long as these businesses decide to participate—and I am fairly sure they will, but if they do not, I am coming for you guys—you can do so with your own BYO container.

I was so glad to hear the member for Black declare this bill would receive bipartisan support in this place and look forward to its successful passage to deliver such a single and effective change to the people and environment of South Australia. I am also really looking forward to our potentially getting some Indian or Thai on Friday nights instead of our usual pizza. Thank you.

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (11:26): I would like to make a few comments in support of this bill and, like other speakers, thank the Hon. Mr Simms from the other place for introducing it to the parliament.

Whether it is in this bill or any other bill, when we talk about how to minimise resources we use to live and carry out our lives, we also need to talk about how we minimise the impact on our planet. Quite clearly, we have a moral obligation to ensure the impact that we as human beings have on this planet is kept to a minimum and that we hopefully leave the planet in a better condition than when we first entered it. We all have a contribution to make to ensure that we minimise the harm to our planet.

On the face of it, this looks like a very modest bill, but I think it is one that is very worthwhile and will make a difference because it is a whole range of little modest bills that actually change people's attitudes and values about the way we live. This bill goes towards that. As mentioned, we were the first state in the country to ban lightweight check-out style plastic bags. Last year, we also banned a whole range of single-use plastic cutlery and stirrers, etc., and we were the first state to introduce bottle deposit legislation. We have actually led Australia, if not the world in a lot of cases, on what we need to do to minimise our resource use by encouraging resource re-use. This is what this bill does.

It might not surprise you, but I am a bit of a coffee addict. I remember that a lot of cafes started to use their own glass containers, which you could re-use. I thought it was a great idea and I bought one. Unfortunately, COVID hit and that was banned, and the use of additional limited resources started again.

This bill will hopefully encourage businesses to promote their own business through re-usable packaging carrying their own brand, which is a good business practice. I certainly bought one and carried that coffee cup with me wherever I went, and people saw the brand. More importantly, it gives consumers a choice as well, and in this case consumers will be encouraged to re-use those containers for things like coffee and foods, etc., and businesses will respond to that.

As I said, even though on the face of it this looks like a very modest bill, it is actually a very good bill because what it does is remove a barrier from being implemented. One of the things businesses look at is risk, which is fair enough. With this bill, if a business owner acts in good faith then, through this legislation, the risk to his or her business is minimal in terms of any potential action. This will go a step further towards encouraging us, every time we do things in our lives, to think about our planet at the same time.

We need to reduce the amount of packaging. As an aside, online businesses are booming but the amount of packaging they use, which turns up at businesses and people's homes, is quite high. I am sure that packaging outstrips the amount of packaging incurred when one buys at the retail level. That is another thing we need to think about: how we reduce the amount of packaging we generate.

In terms of packaging at fast-food outlets, I am not sure how much of that is actually necessary. We need to look at why businesses use all that packaging, if there are other barriers to their reducing it or other risks that we can minimise for them to encourage them to reduce that amount of packaging. This bill certainly goes a long way towards helping in certain circumstances and should be supported. With those few comments, I congratulate the mover of the bill in the upper house and commend the bill to the house.

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Defence and Space Industries, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water) (11:31): I am delighted to close the second reading debate on this bill and acknowledge it has received support from across the chamber, which I am grateful for.

As many speakers have, I would like to draw attention to the big picture reason why we need to make every effort to reduce waste, particularly plastic waste, in our society. We are currently in Plastic Free July, and that gave me occasion to remind myself of some of the horrifying statistics about the waste of resources, particularly in the form of plastic, and also to remind myself not to be complacent that we are necessarily heading in the right direction, despite the warm glow of multipartisanship this bill has enjoyed.

In the first 10 years of this century, as a planet we made more plastic than in the entirety of previous human history—bearing in mind that plastic was invented only a little while ago. That says to me that we are, in fact, escalating our generation of this product, not decreasing it, as a planet. That has two significant problems. One is that even if it were that we never littered plastic, that it never ended up in the waste stream or in the oceans, we are generating greenhouse gas emissions through the generation of the product. It is oil, it is itself a hydrocarbon, and its creation contributes to our risk of runaway climate change.

Even if we were perfect at not littering, the creation of that volume of plastic is a challenge we need to meet, particularly when we are talking about the creation of plastic for the purpose of using it only once. The 'take, make and waste' idea has had its time and should have long since gone; however, it remains with us. Our approach to dealing with that is multipronged, and this bill deals with only a small but an important part of it, which I will return to.

The wastefulness of plastic sits alongside the way in which we have chosen, as a society and a species, to not just dispose of plastic after one or two uses but to then allow that disposal to find its way into the litter stream and into our oceans. By 2050, on the current trajectory, by weight there will be as much plastic in the ocean as fish life. That is a terrifying statistic, and not just one that I found on the internet but one that independently was repeated to me yesterday when I met with the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was a rather surprising element of the conversation, but in fact it should not have been because the shared challenge of climate change sits across all domains and all disciplines.

If we go to the ocean now and look at the surface, 40 per cent has plastic in it. There is not one square mile of ocean surface that is completely plastic free. We have taken this precious commodity, oil, we have turned it into a product that exists forever—every bit of plastic that has ever been made still exists on this planet in the form of plastic—and we have thrown it, essentially, into the ocean. That is a disgrace, and we must not, as I say, be complacent, that because we all feel that it is awful that it will simply go away or stop. We must take a series of actions.

The last government, to which I give credit, initiated the process of removing some single-use plastics. Yesterday, I launched the report from the Green Industries organisation that did a magnificent amount of consultation on the next phase of removal of single-use plastics. Over 3,500 South Australians chose to participate in that consultation, and overwhelmingly they want us to continue down the pathway of removing the option of having single-use plastics. By the end of the year, I look forward to being able to announce the pathway, the time line within which we will address more of those products being removed.

We also have the positive pull of businesses that are choosing to go plastic free and demonstrating to others that that choice works for them and for their customers. Yesterday, I had the delight of being at the cafe Let Them Eat in James Place—I think it is one of five or six premises that that business runs—that simply chose, when they established the business, to be plastic free. Then they discovered that there was such a thing as Plastic Free Champions, so they have become the 42nd Plastic Free Champion in South Australia, a program that I understand has essentially removed five million pieces of plastic that would otherwise, had those businesses chosen not to be plastic free, have been circulating and ending up, tragically, in the ocean.

This bill is another element of how we can assist, and that is not only to remove the risk associated, whether it was real, manifest or not, with businesses contemplating allowing people to bring their own containers to take away food. By the nature of this bill and talking about this bill, we are reminding people that there is that option; it is part of, as the member for Heysen said, the culture change that is required for us to think, 'I don't need to use an object simply once and throw it away—there are alternatives.'

This bill has a legal material difference that it makes, but I hope very earnestly that it also has a culture change opportunity as we talk about it through the mainstream media, through social media and when we go out to business to tell them about this change, that some, if not many of them, might encourage this shift.

I would like to very much thank the Greens as a party for introducing this bill several times, I think, over the years. I have a recollection of Mark Parnell having introduced it; I cannot recall where it ended, but I do know that the Hon. Robert Simms MLC, a member of the other place, has introduced this now twice. The first time, it went through in the last parliament in the upper house, and there is some mystery as to quite why it did not make it through in the lower house.

I note that there is an attempt somehow for this bill to also be to the credit of the Leader of the Opposition, the former Minister for Environment. I am not sure that it is possible to quite lay that claim, given that it did come down to this house and did not go through. In fact, there was some confusion about whether or not it was about to, but it did not, and parliament was prorogued before it was able to. We would already have this well in place had that occurred—an opportunity lost.

However, here we are, here it is and we are now able to not only pass this bill but do so in a way that every single parliamentarian has been able to support. I think that in itself sends a very clear message that we as representatives of the people understand what the people expect, that the people know that we understand the seriousness of the climate change and waste problems we face and that we are prepared to start to do our bit to address them.

Again, I thank the honourable member of the other place Rob Simms for his persistence in bringing this piece of legislation forward. I am delighted that I was able to take it as a piece of legislation and bring it in for debate. I am particularly pleased we have been able to get it through before the break so that we can get on with making this real and also, as I say, talking about it in order to facilitate that culture change of take and waste—that is what we must leave behind collectively. I commend this bill to the house, and I thank all speakers. They all spoke very well.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Defence and Space Industries, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water) (11:41): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.

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