Rockhampton Council Warns It Cannot Meet Queensland Recycling Targets Due to Rising Transport Costs

A regional Queensland council is warning it cannot meet state-imposed recycling targets with the growing cost of moving materials hundreds of kilometres for processing.

Each year 10,000 tonnes of household recyclables collected from the Rockhampton region are driven 600 kilometres to a facility on the Sunshine Coast.

Waste services cost the local council $3 million per year with more than one-third of that bill going to transportation fees.

In June, the Queensland government released its waste strategy and set an overall recycling target of 65 per cent by 2035, with major regional communities including Rockhampton expected to halve the amount of waste it sent to landfill.

Rockhampton Mayor Tony Williams said his council was struggling to improve recycling rates, especially as fuel prices soared.

"We've done our waste plans and [our staff] are saying that we can't achieve the targets that the state government is putting onto councils," he said.

Recyclables from central Queensland households were previously processed at a private materials recovery facility in Rockhampton.

But that was destroyed by a battery fire in 2020.

The council has so far been unable to attract private companies to develop a similar facility.

Mayor Williams said the local government spent about $300 per tonne to send its recyclables for processing, compared to about $100 a tonne for councils in south-east Queensland.

"The cookie-cutter approach to increasing recycling really doesn't help when the tyrannies of distance and the cost to transport that material is ever-increasing," he said.

"With the state government wishing to increase recycling locally, there's no real [financial] benefit unless we get some subsidies towards those transport costs."

In a statement, state environment minister Andrew Powell said the government was providing support for recycling in regional areas, with $11 million in new funding for infrastructure.

The government was also designing a new fund to be spent on helping regional councils send recycling for processing.

Calls for national reforms

Australian Council of Recycling chief Suzanne Toumbourou said the federal government should never have shelved national packaging reforms, which would have eased the burden on regional communities.

"It's extraordinarily disappointing to see that lack of progress in packaging reform," Ms Toumbourou said.

"We should have had regulatory certainty about the fact that burden would be shared much better across the supply chain and much more responsibility would be placed on producers."

In a statement, federal environment minister Murray Watt said the government's focus was to work with state and territory governments to reduce waste by harmonising packaging and recycling policy in Australia.