With Queensland today including glass wine and spirit bottles in their container refund scheme, other states in particular NSW and WA should quickly follow suit.
The benefits are obvious as glass and wine bottles are not collected for best value recycling or not at all – rather they end up as litter or mixed up in kerbside and public space bins where they often break or go straight to landfill. Container refund schemes are all about closed loop recycling and the wine industry needs to be part of it.
We are calling on NSW and WA to act. NSW, in particular, led the explosion of modern refund schemes across Australia and should not fall behind. The desire amongst consumers to include wine and spirit bottles is very widespread and also has the broad support of industry waste and recycling stakeholders.
We are aware the wine industry lobby does not want to be part of 10cent refund scheme, but they don’t have a case. Their arguments remind me of the spurious arguments put up by Coke and other big bottlers, when they lobbied against refunds. Now they champion them. So will the wine and spirit industry once they become part of container refunds.
