SKM shutdown threatens undermining resident recycling habits

Ballarat council's plans to be self-sufficient in the midst of the statewide recycling crisis will hinge on the sale of land from the state government and sourcing buyers for the stockpile of sorted materials.

The shutdown of processor SKM has affected 30 councils across Victoria including Ballarat since the processor refused to take any more materials in the wake of export market turning back recyclables in 2018.

The Ballarat plan is to invest in all-waste interchange to improve sorting of recyclables, reduce contamination and enhance the materials sale ability.

Ballarat Council approved plans in August 2018 to develop the all waste interchange, and improve its processing facilities, allocating $5 million of its own funds in the 2018/19 budget. Initial reports had the interchange planned to completed by October 2019.

Part of this involved transferring the Gillies Street waste interchange to BWEZ.

But City of Ballarat councillor Grant Tillett is still hopeful the all-waste interchange can be operational by Christmas if they can purchase the crown land from the state government and tap into local opportunities for selling the sorted materials.

"Stage two will be to source local buyers for the specific materials, for example such as aluminum cans or tin cans which can be melted down into ingots." he said.

Cr Tillett is also optimistic that the sale of materials to buyers for creative re-use instead of paying a processor will reduce recycling costs to council and allay the fears of increased rubbish levies.

"We have got to do the job to get the project across the line but the problem is not collecting the rubbish and it is not in sorting the rubbish, it is in sourcing the buyers," Cr Tillett told The Courier. "We certainly need to be adventuresome and forward thinking in seeking the uses for the material."

Cr Tillett believes the ease of companies like SKM in simply shipping poorly sorted recycling material offshore has acted as a disincentive to innovation in reuse.

"Everybody got too lazy. It became easier to pay SKM to cart everything away and the councils of Victoria have been very lax in this."

On Sunday the Victorian government remained in talks with major alternative stakeholders to firm up solutions to solve the state's recycling fiasco.

EARLIER: Just days after SKM Recycling, who handles 30 council's recycling including Ballarat, stopped accepting waste, discussions are ramping up to prevent the materials from going to landfill.

"I have been having discussions with colleagues throughout the weekend, and I will be talking to colleagues again this afternoon," Premier Daniel Andrews said on Sunday.

"We are working with the MAV (Municipal Association of Victoria), we are working with affected councils, we are speaking with many players within the industry."

The state government announced a partial solution on Friday where other players would process up to 40 per cent of materials destined for landfill in the short term.

But the alternative operators were not revealed, or how much the deal would cost.

When asked if Mr Andrews would freeze the landfill levy to prevent councils bearing additional costs, or tap into its funds estimated to be about $500 million, he replied:

"The point that you made is not lost on me or colleagues."

Opposition leader Michael O'Brien said the landfill levy pool of cash should be used.

"Daniel Andrews is sitting on a stockpile of over half a billion dollars of taxpayers' money. Daniel Andrews has let the recycling system of Victoria completely fail," he said.

SKM has had a series of fires at its sites, leading to a crackdown by the environmental watchdog for licence breaches, including stockpiling material.

"They can't in fact take any more without breaching their permits with Environment Protection Authority. The system is fully loaded," SKM's representative Rob Spence told ABC radio on Friday.

The EPA said there are no restrictions on SKM taking waste at its Coolaroo, Laverton North, Geelong and Hallam site.

But its subsidiary Glass Recovery Services isn't allowed to take combustible waste.

This doesn't aid SKM as glass waste arrives co-mingled with other types of waste.

SKM has faced court in Victoria and Queensland this week when creditors owed millions of dollars sought that the business be wound up.

A Melbourne court gave SKM more time to repay its debts, which the company hopes to achieve within a week while securing a deal with a potential new owner.

Victorians are being urged to keep up their recycling efforts despite the collapse of kerbside collections for dozens of councils around the state.

At least 60 per cent of materials that would previously have been processed by SKM Recycling will go to landfill after the waste contractor on Thursday night told councils it would stop taking their recyclables.

SKM has contracts with more than 30 Victorian councils including Ballarat, Golden Plains and Pyrenees and had processed about half the state's kerbside recyclables.

Metropolitan Waste and Resource Recovery Group chief executive Rob Millard said at least 60 per cent of about 295,000 tonnes of statewide recycling annually processed by SKM would be going to landfill for the foreseeable future.

"We look like having up to 40 per cent of that material recovered at the moment and we're working with operators how we can increase that over the next weeks and months, and also looking at how we can go out to market with some new collective tenders to increase that again," he said.

Affected councils are urging residents to only put their recycling bins out if full and to reduce the amount of waste generated. People are being advised to squash, squeeze and flatten their recycling so more fits in the bin.

Macedon Ranges acting director of assets and operations, Anne-Louise Lindner, said the council would work with its contractor to send the shire's recycling to a different processing facility.

"Council is committed to resource recovery and does not intend to send any of the shire's recycling to landfill," she said.

Some councils are offering free drop-offs during the latest recycling crisis.

Hobsons Bay council has arranged for free drop-off of paper and cardboard at One Paper in Laverton North.

Darebin's resource and recovery centre is accepting domestic quantities of sorted recycling free of charge at the gate.

Surf Coast Shire has advised residents to work with family or neighbours and try to take separated paper and cardboard to a nearby transfer station.

During last year's SKM shutdown Ballarat Council reverted to stockpiling the waste. Pyrenees and Golden Plains Shire, who use the same landfill facility as Ballarat at Smythesdale, were forced to send recycles into the tip.

The danger is the cost of reverting recyclables to landfill will fill up costly landfill cells faster, potentially increasing council waste expenses by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some councils have attempt to recoup these costs with increased rubbish levies

The crisis has now dragged on for 18 months but another plan by Ballarat Council approved in August 2018 to develop an all waste interchange, and improve its processing facilities remains in limbo

Despite allocating $5 million of its own funds in the 2018/19 budget, initial reports had the interchange planned to completed by October 2019, it is still hanging on $5 million funding from the state government..

Part of this involved transferring the Gillies Street waste interchange to BWEZ but this has not yet occurred.

Hume mayor Carly Moore said its households could continue to recycle by taking sorted household recycling directly to council transfer stations at Sunbury or Campbellfield.

While only four Victorian councils recycle plastic shopping bags, Coles and Woolworths supermarkets accept flexible plastics for recycling.

In an update on its website, Boroondara stated: "The fundamental issue is that the capacity required to manage all of the state's recyclable materials does not exist within the Victorian infrastructure. A world which relies on shipping our waste, albeit recyclable, to other countries is not sustainable."

In January 2018, China began to implement a 0.5 per cent contamination threshold for imported waste, affecting those in the Australian recycling industry who rely on China to process materials such as plastics. Other south-east Asian countries have since followed suit, rejecting shipments of contaminated recyclables shipped from countries including Australia.

That led the domestic market for recyclable goods to collapse, leading waste companies to hold on to items they collect. Stockpiling has stoked fears about the risk of fire, especially following a major blaze at SKM's Coolaroo plant in 2017.

SKM's latest shutdown was triggered by the Environment Protection Authority's decision to ban sister company Glass Recovery Services from accepting more material, because its stockpiles were deemed a fire hazard.

Environment Minister Lily D'Ambrosio said each of more than 30 affected councils could need to negotiate a new contract with a different recycling provider.

"In the immediate sense, up to 40 per cent of materials from SKM will be able to be absorbed into existing capacity of other providers," she said on Friday.

"Let me be very clear about what's caused all of this is one rogue cowboy operator that has refused to comply with the very tough standards and conditions that the EPA has expected them to comply with, and that has put the community at risk."

Municipal Association of Victoria president Coral Ross said the challenges of the past 18 months reinforced the need to develop a local recycling industry.

"I would encourage the community to first avoid waste, to reuse, to reduce, and then recycle," she said. "We need to reduce waste in the first place.

"For councils, we would really like to seee a container deposit scheme introduced. If we took glass out of the recycling components, that would make a large difference to the amount that needs to be recycled or could end up in landfill, and it would avoid contaminants.

"The other thing that we would like to see, if recyclables do need to go to landfill, we would like the landfill levy not imposed upon that, and also, especially for rural councils, some help with the transportation costs of having to take that material to landfill."

With The Age