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Australia

K’gari (Fraser Island) awash with rubbish left behind from tourists

Assorted waste at a landfill in a green forest area, with a sign saying bulk waste.

K’gari (Fraser Island) is Queensland’s small slice of paradise with a massive problem.

The heritage-listed island threatens to become a victim of its own success as millions of tourists are lured across the water each year.

But they’re leaving piles of rubbish in their wake, and overflowing waste stations on the island need urgent upgrades.

“People go over there with cheap camping gear, and when they finish with their holiday, they just throw it in the tip,” Fraser Coast councillor Darren Everard said.

“It is a fragile location, and it needs to be respected.”

Clearing the mess does not come cheap either.

It costs more than $400,000 a year to cart rubbish from tourists and locals off the island via a barge to the mainland, prompting the Fraser Coast Regional Council to plead with the public to follow a “pack in, pack out” rule.

“If you’re taking a product onto the island, you should be taking it off with you as you go… that is best practice,” Mr Everard said.

Landfill and large tip bins surrounded by green trees and shrubs.
A Wongari or dingo fence is all that separates the dump site from the surrounding bush.(ABC Wide Bay: Lucy Loram)

Not a Happy Valley with dump nearby

In the tiny township of Happy Valley on the eastern side of K’gari, a dump site lies just a stone’s throw from the nearest home.

“It is 50 meters from a house. It’s about 20m from a recreation reserve where there’s a picnic table, so it is not ideal,” said Scott Bell, who has lived at Happy Valley for 36 years.

With just a dingo fence separating the landfill from the forest, Mr Bell said the Happy Valley station was a major concern for locals.

“Properties that are very close have got to contend with the smell coming from the tip — and the flies,” he said.

“The blowflies have become quite horrendous in town … I think everyone recognizes it’s not an ideal situation to have that rubbish tip so close to the township.”

An elderly man in a blue shirt and a broncos cap smiles.
Mr Bell says it is more than just a little township’s problem.(ABC Wide Bay: Lucy Loram)

The station is one of three landfill sites on the island, including Eurong and Orchid Beach, comprised of tip bins that collect rubbish not just from the townships but from K’gari’s mass tourist population.

“We get things like commercial kitchens being dumped there, national parks have to dump a lot of rubbish just left at camp sites, so it really is more than just a little township’s problem,” Mr Bell said.

Beautiful place facing challenges

The Happy Valley Community Association is working with the Fraser Coast Regional Council to identify alternative sites for the dump, but it could take some time before the month is addressed.

A line of tip bins in an open forest area.
The landfill is removed from the island in tip bins that are transported to the mainland via a barge.(ABC Wide Bay: Lucy Loram)

Mr Everard said waste transfer on K’gari was a work in progress that would begin with a 10-year waste management and resource recovery strategy.

“The island is a beautiful place and has a number of challenges, so we want to try to ensure that we get that waste removal more workable and less invasive on the island,” he said.

“We have got a bit of work to do, so we’re going to start with the Eurong Transfer Station, and then we’ll move to improve the facilities at Happy Valley and Orchid Beach.”

The upgraded station at Eurong will be capped to mitigate legacy waste and will feature new bays for stainless steel waste and recycling bulk bins when completed in 2024.

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Categories
Business

Winemakers embrace corks again thanks to sustainability push

A bottle of red wine with a colourful label and a cork sticking out.

In news that will strike fear into the heart of anyone who has struggled with a corkscrew, the traditional wine closure — cork — is making a comeback.

While screw caps have dominated the Australian wine industry for decades, a new generation of winemakers is going old school.

Noah Ward is a brand ambassador at Unico Zelo, which produces wines in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills.

He said making wine more sustainable was behind the push to put corks back into bottles.

“You can’t grow a screw cap. It’s a finite resource that you have to mine … but you can grow cork trees til the cows come home,” Mr Ward said.

“There’s also that little plastic polymer that’s not necessarily good for the planet [because it] won’t biodegrade very well.”

Mr Ward said in addition to its environmental benefits, corks also helped wines develop more naturally.

A man pours a glass of red wine at a dimly lit wooden bar, an orange wine is in the foreground.
Unico Zelo brand ambassador Noah Ward says he knows of about 50 winemakers of his generation who were using cork.(Supplied: Unico Zelo)

“Our business started in the 2010s, which was a pretty big shift in the wine industry with the emergence of natural wine or lo-fi wine, minimal intervention, wine. Most of the producers of that ilk were using corks or other products like that ,” he said.

“There are things that screw caps can do better than corks, they can keep wine protected from oxygen for a long period of time, so they can age a lot longer.

“But I like to see a wine develop quicker, so I can actually drink it [sooner rather] than wait 25 years for my semillon to finally get to that point where it’s not extremely high in acid.”

Why did corks fall out of fashion?

General manager Dan Simmons of Australian cork manufacturer Vinocor said the change came about because of a chemical called trichloroanisole or TCA.

“The term is ‘corked’,” he said.

“TCA can make the wine smell like wet cardboard—it basically ruins the wine.

“Back in the 90s, around 5 per cent of wines were being tainted by this chemical compound.”

In response to this, Mr Simmons said Australian wine producers started shifting to screw caps in the early 2000s.

“The cork industry went from supplying nearly all of the market to a position where probably only 10 per cent of the market was filled with cork,” he said.

Then in 2004 Diam created a solution.

“They took some technology that was used by the coffee industry to remove caffeine from coffee beans and adapted that to the cork industry to remove TCA and other flavour-modifying molecules,” Mr Simmons said.

“It also solved the other problem of bottle variation because the Diam cork is actually granulated cork, and then it’s put back together. So they’re very consistent as it removed the problem of random oxidisation.”

But the local industry had moved on.

Three corks on a white background.
The Diam cork is made from granulated offcuts, pieced together with a carbon-based glue.(Supplied: Vinocor)

Mr Simmons said while cork was experiencing a resurgence, making up about 15 per cent of closures of Australian wines, more companies needed to use it to make recycling programs effective.

“The secondary uses are immense,” he said.

“[Cork is in] the soles of shoes, in building products, and sporting goods such as the inside of cricket balls.”

Mr Simmons said Vinocor hoped to work with competitors to encourage the use of corks more widely.

“Sustainability is very important for the wine industry. We’re signatories to the Australian packaging covenant, so we need to find ways to make sure that our packaging products are recyclable or compostable,” he said.

“Certainly in other markets around the world, like in America and in Europe, collecting corks for recycling is just normal practice because they have the critical mass.”

A wine bottle with a cork and glasses on the back of a white ute
Unico Zelo lists packaging materials, such as corks and palettes, in online marketplaces or donates them to local kindergartens.(Supplied: Unico Zelo)

not corkscrew? No problem

Mr Ward said once consumers understood the benefits of cork, they were on board.

But ensuring they had the tools to open wines with this closure had been a challenge.

Last year Unico Zelo even ran a “sabre off” competition calling for customers to share videos on social media of them cutting open wine bottles.

A glass of white wine next to a cork on a corkscrew
The raw material of cork is taken from a cork oak, with the tree able to be harvested up to 15 times during its life.(Supplied: Vinocor)

“One of my favorite things in the world is trying to MacGyver open a bottle of wine,” Mr Ward said.

“You can even open wine with a shoe, I’ve done that a few times before, you can get tricky with drills… you can even use a spatula.”

“But I think now it’s becoming one of those things where if you’re into wine and you start buying stuff from interesting small producers you’re going to have to spend 10 bucks to buy a corkscrew.”

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Categories
Australia

ACT partners with federal government to build new composting and recycling facilities, cut emissions by a third

Organic waste in a pile.

The federal government has announced $13 million in funding for a new large-scale composting facility in Canberra.

The facility will be built in Hume and will process food and garden waste collected from household green bins across the city.

City Services Minister Chris Steel said the new facility was an essential part of the food organics and garden organics (FOGO) rollout in the ACT.

“It will turn around 50,000 tonnes of food and organic waste into valuable compost for use in the agriculture and viticulture of our region, and gardens,” he said.

“This is incredibly important for climate change, this is our third largest source of emissions.”

‘True circular process’

Close up of an organic waste bin.
FOGO collection and processing is expected to cut the ACT’s waste emissions by 30 per cent. (ABC News: Harry Frost)

About 5,000 households in Belconnen, Bruce, Cook and Macquarie are currently trialling a FOGO collection system.

Mr Steel said that service would be expanded to include all ACT households once the new facility was up and running.

“This is going to be a fantastic story,” he said.

“This is Canberrans’ food waste that will be turned into compost, so that we can return those nutrients—which are otherwise going to landfill—to the soil to improve our soil and then grow our food again.

“So, it will be a true circular process.”

A person wearing a suit holds a green topped bin.
It’s not yet known what items will and won’t be allowed in the new FOGO processing stream. (ABC News: Harry Frost)

Mr Steel said a new $23 million recycling facility would also be built in Hume.

“We were partnering with [the federal government] to upgrade the existing facility to process our plastic, aluminium, paper and cardboard products, as well as glass,” he said.

“But as we’ve progressed through the design process, we’ve now come to the conclusion that it would be better for us to build a new state-of-the-art materials recovery facility adjacent to the existing site.”

He said the government would now go through a procurement process and he hoped both facilities would be operational within 18 months, though he noted the unpredictably of the current construction market.

Education key to FOGO success

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PlayAudio. Duration: 9 minutes 29 seconds

Zero Waste Evolution chair Mia Swainson discusses the new Canberra composting facility.

Zero Waste Evolution chair Mia Swainson welcomed the funding injection and said a simple, targeted education program would be essential ahead of the FOGO facility coming online.

“The key is bringing Canberrans on the journey, making sure that people know what can go into the processing and what can’t,” she said.

“Depending on the technology, there’ll be different food and garden waste from around the house that can go in and some that can’t.

“So, keeping that contamination level down low will be really key to success.”

Ms Swainson said success would require a new way of thinking about waste for many Canberrans.

“Globally the trend is for… all of the organic waste to be recycled and reprocessed,” she said.

“Yes, it’s a bit of a change and a cultural shift, but, overtime people get used to it and it’s just how we build our lives.”

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Categories
Business

Can you recycle old make-up packaging? Here’s what’s happening in the $8 billion industry that creates tonnes of waste

Can you recycle old make-up packaging? Here's what's happening in the $8 billion industry that creates tonnes of waste

Australians spend billions of dollars on beauty products every year, but the leftover packaging mostly ends up in landfill.

It’s estimated that more than 10,000 tonnes of cosmetic waste goes to landfill every year in Australia, because make-up products aren’t generally accepted in kerbside recycling.

That’s because they are too small to be sorted at a regular facility and often contain complex and mixed materials as well as remnant product, which makes them tricky to recycle alongside regular glass and plastics.

So what should you be doing with your old make-up and perfumes?

What are companies doing?

More Australian and international beauty brands and retailers are now offering take-back schemes where you can return used beauty products in-store so they can be recycled.

The products, including skin cream tubes, plastic and metal eyeshadow palettes, foundation and fragrance bottles are sorted into different waste streams like glass, metal, soft and hard plastics.

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