Rockhampton Council Warns of Recycling Target Shortfall Amid Soaring Transport Costs

Rockhampton Regional Council is facing significant challenges in meeting state-imposed recycling targets due to escalating transportation costs. The council is required to send 10,000 tonnes of household recyclables collected from the region 600 kilometres to a facility on the Sunshine Coast for processing each year.

The cost of waste services for the local council is $3 million per year, with over one-third of that bill going towards transportation fees. Rockhampton Mayor Tony Williams stated that his council is struggling to improve recycling rates, especially with soaring fuel prices.

"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.

"It's a really difficult position for councils to be in (because) if we increase the volumes of recycling, it just costs us more to transport it,"

Previously, recyclables from central Queensland households were processed at a private materials recovery facility in Rockhampton. However, that facility was destroyed by a battery fire in 2020, and the council has been unable to attract private companies to develop a similar facility locally.

The council currently spends about $300 per tonne to send its recyclables for processing, compared to about $100 a tonne for councils in south-east Queensland. Mayor Williams expressed his concerns about the state's approach to increasing recycling.

"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 response, state environment minister Andrew Powell stated that the government is providing support for recycling in regional areas, with $11 million in new funding for infrastructure. The government is also designing a new fund to help regional councils send recycling for processing.

Australian Council of Recycling chief Suzanne Toumbourou called for national reforms, expressing disappointment in the lack of progress on packaging reform.

"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 is to work with state and territory governments to reduce waste by harmonising packaging and recycling policy in Australia.