It looks like snow : how Australia plans to fix the horrifying blight of expanded polystyrene Graham Readfearn
On a two-kilometre stretch of the Yarra River east of Melbourne’s CBD a few years ago, volunteers were gathering rubbish from the banks and reeds.
Among all the discarded bottles and bits of plastic sucked up with an oversized vacuum were an estimated 5 million pieces of expanded polystyrene – some in the form of tiny white balls, others in chunks at various stages of disintegration.
“It is not how a river should look,” says Andrew Kelly, the fulltime Yarra riverkeeper on the ubiquity of this feather-light expanded plastic, known as EPS.
Queensland last to commit to recycling infrastructure investment
Queensland is the only state left to announce how it proposes to match and invest the Commonwealth’s funding commitment of $190 million through its Recycling Modernisation Fund (RMF) to upgrade and expand glass, plastic and tyre recycling infrastructure.
National Waste and Recycling Industry Council (NWRIC) CEO Rose Read said the Commonwealth’s RMF represents a $190 million commitment to co-invest in critical recycling infrastructure with state and territory governments and industry on a 1:1:1 basis as a response to the COAG Waste Export ban agreed in March 2020.
“It’s disappointing that Queensland had not yet confirmed its funding commitment when every other state and territory had begun utilising the Fund.