Fundamentalism and Container Deposits

Some beliefs outside the religious context are so tightly held that they mirror the devotion of religious beliefs.  I want to examine a secular belief on a small matter that attracts it own “religious” fanatics.

The idea that we all pay a deposit on drink containers is really popular amongst a slew of people from Greenpeace on the left to traditional Coalition voters on the right. But this belief, transcending as it does, Australia’s great political divide, is a bad idea.

How can I maintain such an untenable position?  We will get to the reasons later but the interesting thing about the belief in container deposit legislation (CDL) is that exemplifies the power of belief. Belief defeats logic every time.  As the great JFK observed,

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

What do you say when a popular belief is wrong? I feel like I am killing Bambi. CDL has all the power of a resilient belief, nostalgia, superficial logic and a sense that believing in CDL puts one on the side of the angels.  Let me amputate the angelic wings.

When I was growing up we all loved to collect bottles and get the money. I have an acquaintance who would jump the fence of the Milk Bar, steal some bottles, walk around to the front and use the thruppenny bits to buy an Eskimo Pie for a shilling.  What a jolly jape!  It surely saved bottles from the tip and surely led to a litter free world.  But that was the world of the fifties and sixties. Now South Australia is the one state with CDL and the idea, accordingly has a state full of CDL advocates.

We live, however, in a world where packaging has gone way beyond just beverages. The idea of wrapping your fish and chips in yesterday’s newspaper is dead for marketing, health and other reasons.  Newspapers are almost dead themselves!  And there’s the rub. The worst litter is not beverages but your Maccas wrapping, your supermarket bags and your ciggie butts – not beverage containers.

We have developed industrial style responses to deal with the growth of packaging. The waste recovery and recycling systems are huge integrated and increasingly efficient.  Litter, the problem CDL aims to address, has been joined by another scourge, carbon. So policy responses on packaging must deal with both issues. For example, modern beverage containers have been light weighted to diminish carbon in both transport and manufacture.  They are unwashable if returned to the milk bar and cannot be reused. Incidentally, CDL requires you take your bottles to special depots not the local milk bar.  

All in all, it is a popular but fundamentalist idea that, like zombies, refuses to die. Partially that is because green groups fund raise on the idea and so have a financial conflict of interest.  They cannot be objective for that would undermine their fund raising campaigns. 

A green group  is now locked into the campaign against CDL and being objective could be financially damaging.

 

 

But generally, politics is about belief and passion (with a small "p"). So using the nomenclature of religious belief we proffer these Ten Commandments about why, in a carbon constrained world, CDL is a rubbish idea. 

10 CONTAINER COMMANDMENTS

1. The evidence is that SA (5.36 litres per 1,000m) is dirtier than our state of Victoria (3.99 litres per 1,000m) and on that point, the whole argument about CDL should fall (Figures sourced from Keep Australia Beautiful Litter Index 2010/2011);

2. CDL was popular when glass containers could be washed and reused. This does not happen now and so CDL is an anachronism.  Rewashing is wasteful of water and would require heavy duty packaging which would lead to more intensive water usage and carbon emissions carting heavy packaging around.

3. CDL requires us to separate the waste stream into waste with a deposit and waste without and that leads to duplication of trucks going hither and yon that increases the carbon miles of waste treatment and would require a vast bureaucracy tracking down every deposit.

4. CDL was popular when there were scouts around whom in “Bob a Job Week” could take the Widow Smith's bottles away. Bob a Job is another anachronism that has disappeared with decimalization.  The volunteers to do this have disappeared too. Try getting a young person to dump their screen and go on a "bottle drive". This would lead to marginal poor doing demeaning rummaging through bins. There are no "Widow Smiths" anymore because immigration has changed the nature of Australian surnames and widows now are often happy, relieved and re partnered rather than powerless.  In fact I remember in my youth that every scout hall was littered with huge piles of bottles that were infrequently picked up (large labour cost for low value product). Selective memory of the past is misleading.

5. MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, packaging is not just about litter but about carbon. CDL will undermine our recycling system which was nonexistent in the old days. This makes CDL a potential form of environmental vandalism. 

6. SECOND MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, because CDL only hits part of the waste stream and misses out on the biggest litters (cigarette butts, plastic and takeaway food litter), it misses out on the main problems;

The picture shows that NONE of the litter (or may be one piece) would be covered by the CDL idea.  Litter is awful but we need to look at the whole picture not just drink bottles.  Taken from Greenpeace site on 20 June 2013

7. CDL sends a message that some litter is ok because it has a message that throwing away bottles is justified because you lose your deposit and that is fine by that system. That is a terrible and confusing message to send.

8. CDL would blow up the Australian Packaging Covenant which works by collaboration.  The Covenant brings packaging people into the same room as government and community and leads to big improvements in design and money for waste infrastructure.  To undermine the Covenant would be a disaster.

9. Often the packaging is less deleterious in terms of water use and carbon emission than the food or drink contained therein.  About 30% of all food gets thrown out. Sometimes more packaging (in terms of small packages or packages that stop deterioration) is less environmentally damaging than less packaging. CDL does not take this into account.

10. THIRD MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, the expense of the CDL system would be shifted on to the food bill. I know one beverage manufacturer who adds 14.5 cents per unit on to their produce in SA. This regressive charge on families should be resisted. South Australians unwittingly pay this but in a more transparent national debate, it would be manifest. CDL would prove less efficient and fair than other systems.

If you want a more fully referenced article I have done a similar piece at https://theconversation.com/container-deposit-laws-past-their-use-by-date-15234 

DECLARATION: Dick Gross is affiliated with Bicycle Networks Victoria, the National Trust, the ALP, Media Alliance, Keep Australia Beautiful Victoria Inc. and the National Packaging Covenant Council. He does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. 

I have been a member of the KAB Victoria Inc. board for a few months but my views on CDL have been well known for years since the EPA report in 2003 first signaled the problems with CDL. I have years of involvement in this issue as a representative of local government predating by over a decade and a half my membership of KABV.  KABV Inc. is a tiny organisation that arose when the Victorian KAB operation almost went under and was saved by the Victorian government. My actual organisation gets no direct funding from anyone that I know of. However, other parts of the KAB national network do receive funding from the packaging industry but I have no knowledge of, control of or benefit from this funding.