The soft drink and alcohol industries have begun a national campaign to head off growing moves for an Australia-wide scheme where consumers pay a 10¢ refundable deposit on all drinks containers.
Twelve mainly industry groups led by the Food and Grocery Council and including the Australian Workers Union ran full-page advertisements in newspapers yesterday in what they say is the first stage of a campaign to convince state environment ministers meeting in August of the shortcomings of a deposit scheme.
With signs that most state ministers are increasingly sympathetic to such a scheme, a coalition of environment groups called the Boomerang Alliance attacked the advertisements as ”another attempt to mislead and bully decision makers”.
The general manager of the Packaging Stewardship Forum in the Food and Grocery Council, Jenny Pickles, would not say whether the group would run TV advertisements opposing container deposits but said it would release ”a variety of educational materials”.
For three decades South Australia had been the only jurisdiction where a deposit is paid on all drink bottles. That changed this year when the Northern Territory introduced a 10¢ deposit scheme.
The Tasmanian parliament has also voted in support of a scheme while governments in Western Australia and Victoria increasingly support the idea.
Ms Pickles condemned the territory scheme as ”a total disaster” and said the 10¢ deposit did not go close to covering the costs. She said a carton of beer had increased as a result by an average of between $3 and $4 and that if such a scheme was introduced nationally consumers would see the cost of an average grocery basket increase by 1.35 per cent.
While opinion polls have repeatedly shown the South Australia scheme has overwhelming support, Ms Pickles said that was because it was set up before kerbside recycling schemes and people were now used to it. ”Container deposits were a ‘70s solution to a ‘70s problem,” she said.
Much better, she said, was the packaging industry plan to install 30,000 recycling bins in public areas around the country where it was ”cost effective” for councils to empty them.
The national policy director of the Boomerang Alliance, Dave West, denied the industry claims about the impact on prices and said the scheme’s success in South Australia proved that. ”The worst case scenario is half a cent per container. The wholesale price of a container of Coke will go up half a cent,” he said.
He accused Coca-Cola of driving the opposition campaign and said the Food and Grocery Council was a front group it used to avoid publicly opposing a container scheme which was popular with its customers.
Ms Pickles dismissed this claim as ”ridiculous” and said the council had 120 members including manufacturers like Nestle, Goodman Fielder and Johnson & Johnson.
A spokeswoman for the manufacturer of Coke, Coca-Cola Amatil, said the company ”doesn’t have a comment about the container deposit scheme”.
The federal government released a ”consultation regulation impact statement” last year on how best to deal with low rates of recycling, especially of glass, plastic and steel and reduce the amount of litter packaging creates.
When state and federal environment ministers meet in August they are expected to pick one or more options, including a container deposit scheme, and order further comprehensive testing on their impact before deciding which, if any, they will adopt.
