Wednesday, 27 August 2025

Waste and recycling management

Tim READ (Brunswick) (19:18): (1288) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Environment, and the action I seek is for Victoria to ban unnecessary single-use plastic items, including bread tags, soy sauce fish, coffee cups, produce bags and fruit and veg stickers, which are still far too common in our state. Plastics are mostly made from fossil fuels, and because they do not readily biodegrade they instead break down into smaller micro and nanoplastic fragments that find their way into every corner of our environment and even ourselves.

As I stand here today, it is likely that I have a plastic spoon’s worth of nanoplastics floating around in my brain, as does everyone else in this room according to a recent study from the University of New Mexico. While this may go some way to explaining the behaviour of some of us, I think we can all agree it would be better if the contents of our brains were just brains. Another study found microplastics in human placenta tissue, so we are now saddling children with this problem before they are even born.

We know plastics leach nasty chemical additives into their surrounding environment, and these chemicals have been linked to health problems in humans because some of them mimic hormones. The environmental impacts of our addiction to plastic can easily be seen by anyone who has visited their local litter-clogged creek lately, where dedicated clean-up volunteers struggle to keep up with the constant river of rubbish. And we know animals up and down the food chain are ingesting microplastics, which block their digestive tracts and even starve some species to death.

In recent years South Australia has banned a number of single-use plastic items that are still available in Victoria, including heavyweight plastic bags, plastic coffee cups and lids, produce bags, plastic confetti and expanded polystyrene fruit and meat trays, among others, and the South Australian government is still going – soy sauce fish and juice box straws will be banned as of next Monday.

Meanwhile, in Victoria our government banned a few single-use plastic items in early 2023, but things have been pretty quiet since then. I understand the states are working together on a national road map to reduce plastics, but this is taking years, and that process is no excuse for us to sit on our hands and wait while more plastics accumulate in our bodies. If South Australia can be a leader in eliminating unnecessary single-use plastic items from their state, so can we. It is time for this government to show the same leadership and stop these waterway-clogging, brain-infesting fossil fuel products from polluting our state. Minister, when it comes to eliminating single-use plastics, why can’t Victoria be more like South Australia?