Battery dumping fails acid test
Most Australians personally want to do the right thing for the environment but the increasing frequency of recycling programs appears to be not all they claim to be, risking undermining public trust.
Former employees of the recycling company, which operates a national network of Ecobatt battery collection bins for retailers including Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Bunnings. reporter The company throws away, stockpiles or incinerates millions of batteries.
Our investigation by Ben Cubby and Bianca Hall has found evidence that Ecocycle group, Australia’s largest battery recycling company, has persistently avoided audits that would shed light on battery processing claims.
Data from AirTag geolocation devices secretly placed inside batteries collected by Ecocycle showed that the waste was diverted from the company’s main processing center in Melbourne to a suburban scrapyard with a problematic environmental history, where it disappeared.
The government-backed Battery Stewardship Council, which runs the national B-Cycle programme, has admitted that Ecocycle has failed to confirm what actually happened to all the 10,000 tonnes of used batteries it collected and has now launched its own investigation into the company.
Ecocycle said regulators had not detected any recent problems at the company’s work sites and accused its industry rivals of spreading misinformation about recycling practices.
But the company was fined for breaches at one of its facilities in Victoria, and in 2020 dangerously sloppy working practices were found at the company’s e-waste facility in St Marys, west of Sydney, where batteries from NSW were collected before being trucked to Melbourne.
Australians have been in a recycling predicament before.
In late 2022, Australians discovered that most of the soft plastic left in supermarkets for recycling (shopping bags, wrapping paper, food packaging and so on) was not recycled at all. Instead, at least 12,000 tonnes were pushed into warehouses in three states and forgotten after REDcycle, the Melbourne company responsible for collecting the waste, was unable to process the leftover stock. Four years after the collapse of REDcycle, it was announced on Thursday that consumers could be revived under a new national scheme to recycle their soft plastics at major supermarkets.
The soft plastics debacle is a wake-up call about how much the Australian recycling industry needs better oversight.
Australia’s increasing dependence on electronic devices has created a glut of used batteries, which has emerged as an urgent and deadly environmental problem.
Exploding lithium batteries cause fires on an almost daily basis in NSW and Victoria, while disposable alkaline and nickel-metal hydride batteries bring their own set of toxins that can poison people and the environment. The average Australian uses around 13 batteries a year, with most ending up in landfill.
Battery recycling has evolved from a niche environmental concern to a critical pillar of economic security and fire safety, and the plans are drawing funding from battery manufacturers and public coffers: the Victorian and Western Australian governments have given nearly $4 million to Ecocycle.
Australians go to great lengths to protect the environment. Regulators must ensure recyclers deliver on their promises and taxpayers get value for money.
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