By Jacqueline Ong

VICTORIANS have a“ huge” appetite for recycling but viable recycling needs to strike a balance between what’ s good for the environment and what makes economic sense.

Acknowledging that a greater understanding of market dynamics was required in order to further push up recycling rates across the state, Sustainability Victoria( SV) began developing a roadmap to strike a balance between the“ push” or supply of materials and the“ pull” or demand for products made from recovered resources. This culminated in SV’ s Victorian Market Development Strategy for Recovered Resources released in June, which seeks to realise the full economic value of resource recovery opportunities and highlights the way government can intervene within a market-based system.

To date, the roadmap has been hailed a step forward by industry stakeholders, including Ai Group’ s

Waste Industry Alliance and the Australian Council of Recycling( ACOR), which said the strategy ticked all the boxes for its members.

Stimulating, not damaging markets

Governments can certainly play a key role in stimulating markets and in speaking with SV CEO Stan Krpan, it is evident that the organisation has no intention of going it alone. If anything, it is relying on industry to inform its programs and initiatives and Krpan told Inside Waste the government is conscious of the flipside of intervention.

“ Governments can be reluctant to intervene because you can damage markets as well. We are very careful about the markets and one of the ways we can ensure against skewing markets perversely is by inviting peak bodies, and in some cases companies, to the table when we’ re designing the intervention so that they are well designed,” he said.

The strategy details a 30-year vision, 10-year strategic outlook, and five-year actions for market development in the state. Seven key priority products have also been selected for the first five years: organics including timber, tyres, e-waste, flexible plastics, glass fines, and concrete and bricks.

Krpan noted that there are ongoing R & D projects for a few of these materials such as tyres, glass, and plastics and in keeping with its mantra of working with the sector, SV has partnered with a range of organisations.

“ We’ ve got R & D projects now that are looking at the performance of glass-derived products in roads. We’ re working with Swinburne University and VicRoads,” Krpan said.

“ SV is also developing a market development strategy for end-of-life tyres in conjunction with Tyre Stewardship Australia( TSA) and we’ ve had a number of R & D projects in partnerships with TSA. We’ re about to make some announcements regarding plastic as well and again,

SV CEO Stan Krpan and Close the Loop general manager Nerida Mortlock. Close the Loop was inducted into the Victorian Manufacturing Hall of Fame in June.( Credit: SV)

there’ s a partnership there because the Australian Packaging Covenant is very interested in the performance of plastics and new products.

And the government will play a part in a variety of ways.

“ Basically, what we’ re saying is, if there’ s a market failure where there is