Single-use plastics ban now in place
Victoria's ban on the sale and supply of single-use plastic items is now in place, applying to all businesses and organisations.
From today, single-use plastic drinking straws, cutlery, plates, drink stirrers and cotton bud sticks made from conventional, degradable, and compostable plastics will be banned in Victoria. The ban also applies to food service items and drink containers made from expanded polystyrene.
Sustainability Victoria (SV) is supporting the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action in the delivery of the single-use plastic ban, providing a complementary focus on increasing reuse across the hospitality industry.
Interim CEO Matt Genever said SV is focused on promoting the uptake of reusables within the hospitality industry, as well as waste avoidance.
“We’re encouraging food-serving businesses to look at where they sit in the circular economy and consider how they can drive reuse over single use.”
In preparing for the ban, SV engaged face to face with more than 3,400 hospitality businesses in 34 local governments areas across Gippsland, Barwon South West and metropolitan Melbourne, with a strong focus on reaching culturally and linguistically diverse business owners and staff. SV also held free online masterclasses for businesses to learn more about implementing reuse options.
Kelly’s Bakery owner Michelle Beggs said her business found the engagement with SV extremely helpful.
“We found out about the ban when a rep from SV came to the bakery and dropped off some information,” Michelle said.
“We also called the hotline because we had some further questions about some of our packaging. We’re now feeling very prepared for the ban.”
SV is also supporting food-serving businesses to replace single-use plastics with reusable items through the Circular Economy Reuse Pilots Fund.
Watch the video to learn how grant recipient Free to Feed has used funding from the Victorian Government to embrace reusable options for catering packaging.
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Transcript: Reducing Single-Use Plastics – Free to Feed
Speakers:
Matt Genever, Interim CEO, Sustainability Victoria
Helen Addison-Smith, Kitchen team leader, Free to FeedMatt: We're here at Free to Feed, a fantastic social enterprise out in Fitzroy North, and we're here announcing one of our grant recipients from the Circular Economy Reuse Pilots fund, which was set up to support businesses to transition away from single-use plastics.
As we all know from the 1st of February 2023, a number of problematic single-use plastics will be banned here in Victoria and so organisations like Free to Feed need to make sure that they've got solutions in place to move away from those materials.
Helen: Free to Feed is a training kitchen for refugees, recently arrived migrants and asylum seekers. We do catering and we do cooking classes, so we use all of the funds that are raised through our various enterprise to go back into our programs to support our participants.
We were already using compostable and recyclable packaging, but we've received a nice little grant from Sustainability of Victoria to change over the packaging that our catering goes into, into a circular economy solution, so the lunch boxes and the crates and the reusable cutlery, so we can send all of our food out to customers in that.
Matt: Around a third of all litter in Victoria is made up of single-use plastic items. And so it's really important that we remove those from the litter stream.
One of the ways that we're doing that is through the implementation of a ban, so that they're no longer around. People aren't getting them from takeaway stores and as a result, they're not making their way into the litter stream. We're reducing landfill, reducing litter, a win-win here for the state.
Helen: We're estimating at the moment, very conservatively, that we'll save about 8000 pieces of single-use catering packaging per year. It's about $4,500 a year at our most conservative estimate. But yeah, we're hoping to scale up and go for something much bigger than that.
Matt: Victoria is a hub for innovation. I've got no doubt that really soon single-use plastics will be a dirty word. It just won't be used anymore. We've got the types of businesses, the innovation, the incentives here to make sure that we're moving completely away from these materials, moving towards circular packaging solutions that have no single-use plastics and I can't wait for that day to come.
Since December 2022, more than $630,0000 has been provided to 16 projects across Victoria who are now implementing innovative waste avoidance and reuse solutions.
More than half of the businesses SV reached out to ahead of the single-use plastic ban were also keen to learn more about reusable systems in a positive sign for Victoria’s transition to a circular economy.
