Boomerang Alliance Newsletter - September 2019
Image by Shirley Hirst from Pixabay
Boomerang Alliance considers the following actions to offer a good guide to achieving a circular economy:
- Prioritise the use of renewable, non-toxic and sustainable materials in manufacturing, whilst minimising resource use
- Design products for post-consumer re-use or recycling
- Maximise product lifespans through maintenance and repair
- Manage discarded products so that they are efficiently collected for re-use or recycling.
- Discarded products should be managed to achieve their highest resource value
- Collaborate throughout the product supply chain to maximise resource value, jobs and business opportunities in collection and resource recovery
- Educate consumers on the value of finite resources and the need to retain these in the economy, and specifically about best practice procurement and discard behaviour to achieve a circular economy
Buy Australian Recycled stuff – the real solution
Recycling is not just putting materials into the yellow bin – we need to create demand for products made out of those materials otherwise recycling doesn’t work and Councils are faced with stockpiles of materials with no markets. Nobody likes to hear about recyclables going to landfill! But with the collapse of the export market, that’s where they will go – or to dangerous waste to energy.
Buy Australian Recycled Procurement policies should be mandated at federal, state and local levels and for packaging. Environment ministers are discussing a 30% recycled content requirement by 2025 – but that should be a minimum – already some products are 100%.
Stay tuned for more actions in the Buy Recycled campaign. Help us by sending in the name and photo of your favourite thing made of recycled content or worst example of wasteful packaging without recycled content to: [email protected]. Also tell us where you bought it.