THE HON TANYA PLIBERSEK MP
MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC SYDNEY BREAKFAST
WEDNESDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2024
SUBJECTS: FAST FASHION; SEAMLESS PROGRAM; ASBESTOS.
CRAIG REUCASSEL: Look, talking of the environment actually, fast fashion is back in the spotlight and the huge impact it has on our environment. The fashion industry's responsible for 10 per cent of the humanity's carbon emissions. It's more carbon than international flights and maritime shipping combined according to the Minister, Tanya Plibersek, who last year in June said that she gave the fashion industry one year to clean up its act. She's here to tell us how it's going now. Thanks for coming to the ABC studio, Tanya.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: It's great to talk to you.
REUCASSEL: Lovely. Okay, just quickly before we get to fashion I just want to ask you about Julian Assange and his appeal to stop being extradited to the US. What's the Government doing to bring him home? He's apparently quite sick at the moment and couldn't turn up to court today.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well we've made it very clear since being elected that we want to see Julian Assange being brought home. The Prime Minister's been very clear in his communication with his counterparts in the US and the UK. We're not going to, you know, broadcast those discussions but the position of the Australian Government is that this matter has gone on too long and that Julian Assange should be brought home.
REUCASSEL: Yeah, okay. Moving on to fast fashion. You gave a speech about this. Can you talk me through donation dumping. What's donation dumping?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, people really want to do the right thing. I know that Australians are really well motivated to recycle more so they wear something a few times and they think they're going to take it around to the local charity, maybe leave it on the front door after hours. And because of the quality of some of this clothing it just is not able to be resold by those charities. In fact charities end up spending about $18 million a year actually disposing of a lot of things that are not in good enough condition to be resold and so those things end up in landfill anyway.
I guess really what I'm talking about today is the fashion industry working a little harder to change the way they design clothing, to make it easier to repair, reuse, recycle, repurpose, and consumers also being a little more careful in the things that they choose.
Now this is not saying it's a bad thing to have a cheap T‑shirt, and any of us who have had kids know, you know, the amount of clothing that kids go through. It's just choosing the T‑shirt that you'll get 60 wears out of rather than 20 wears out of, other than one wear out of.
REUCASSEL: Yeah, exactly. It's not about how expensive the clothing is necessarily, it's how many times you actually wear the damn thing.
Given that 97 per cent of clothing's designed and manufactured overseas what can you do as a government though to stop the problems involved in fast fashion?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, look, that's exactly why we have to be working in partnership with the retailers, and we already last year had six very large brands sign on to this Seamless Program that the fashion industry itself has come up with it. So Big W signed up, Rip Curl, The Iconic, RM Williams, David Jones, Lorna Jane, I mean brands that every Australian would have heard of.
Their proposal was that they would work together as a fashion industry to change the design of clothing, to think about the type of materials they're choosing, but also to invest in recycling some of that clothing as well. We do some clothing recycling in Australia but really not very much. The Government's already made some contributions to some really interesting technologies, like enzyme-based recycling that could be really effective for some of those synthetic fabrics. But having the fashion industry involved is obviously better, where we've got product stewardship schemes like the motor oil scheme, like the tyre scheme that have industry involvement, you do see the opportunity for greater participation from industry.
REUCASSEL: Now you said six brands had signed up last year. Do we know how many brands have actually signed up now to the Australian Fashion Council's clothing stewardship scheme?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, there's a couple of more that have joined since then. The Sussan Group joined, Cotton On Group. Again, very large brands. And we've got information that a few others are likely to join in coming months.
If these companies all participate that will cover about 20 per cent of the fashion sold in Australia. So we'd like to see even higher participation than that.
The option is if the fashion industry don't get it together I've made very clear that I'm prepared to regulate. We're doing that with packaging at the moment. We all know what a problem packaging is in Australia and how stubbornly difficult a problem it has been. So in that case I'm working with States and Territories to actually regulate, change the design of packaging, use less virgin plastic in the first place, deal better with packaging so that it can be recycled.
So reduce the amount we use, recycle what we do use and we're making very substantial investments to be able to do that. In fact working with the States and Territories and the private sector we've now invested a billion dollars to increase Australia's recycling capacity by about a million tonnes a year. So that's a good first step.
REUCASSEL: Well it is good and as you said you've stepped in in the case of packaging and tried to actually regulate this. As you said, with this fashion scheme though, when you launched it you said, "If I'm not happy I'll step in and regulate". Are you happy with 20 per cent of the fashion industry signing up? I mean that's ‑ if my kids come back with 20 per cent I'm not generally happy with that result.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, I'd like to see participation higher, but I've got to give the industry an opportunity to do that off their own bat.
REUCASSEL: Yeah.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I've told them very clearly that I'm watching very closely and of course I am prepared to step in and regulate. It makes more sense if they can get it sorted themselves, if they can, you know, set an industry levy, use that money to change designs, to change the recycling system. So, for example, the collection system, better sorting would, for example, make it much easier to recycle what we can recycle, reuse what we can reuse.
And of course there's some, as I said, really exciting new technologies emerging, particularly around enzyme-based recycling the Commonwealth Government's already supported through the industry and science portfolio, companies like Samsara that are doing enzyme-based recycling. If we can get that off the ground then I think we'll be doing a really good thing for the environment.
REUCASSEL: Well the companies like Samsara, is your hope that by getting clothing companies into this stewardship scheme that they'll help pay for that to become a reality, or is that fall on the Government?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Oh, absolutely. No, that's the absolute purpose of this. The companies joining the clothing stewardship scheme, the first bit of behaviour we hope it will change is the design. So if companies are actually taking responsibility for the full life cycle of the products that they're making or selling, I think you get that really strong incentive to change the design so that clothing can be more easily recycled, repurposed, reused, re‑loved by someone else.
But it's also about the, you know, physical investment in the collection, the sorting and the recycling of clothing. Keeping it out of landfill. The physical things we need to do to stop it ending up in landfill.
REUCASSEL: Yeah. As you say, part of this scheme is to help or to try and encourage clothing companies to design the clothing better. But part of the problem is that consumers, like we kind of wear them for a lot less time. We throw them out, we put them into charity bins, we get rid of them that way. You know, is there any way you can change the kind of marketing of fashion so that we ‑ I mean in the end companies are going to change the design but they're still going to market it so that you're going to go, "Hey, get the new thing. Get the new thing. Get the new thing", and that's where this kind of churn comes from, doesn't it?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah. Look, I think part of this is about consumer education. Young people in particular are really, really committed to the environment. Like, you know, I've got three kids. I watch the way they try and, you know, reduce the amount of stuff that they're buying and using and chucking out. I know that a lot of kids, like my kids, love thrifting.
I think really the role of social media can be ‑ it has pernicious in some ways, it has kind of created this, you know, you can only wear an outfit once. If you've got the same outfit on in Instagram twice you're, you know, a pariah. It is also the antidote to that, you know. There are some great young influencers out there who are showing their thrifted outfits, who are remaking clothing, you know, modifying it in a way that is so creative. So I think it can also be part of the answer to the fast fashion.
Now the other thing I think it's really important to be clear about is cheaper clothing is really good for families that are on a tight budget. Most of us are really happy about the fact that we don't have to pay as much for clothing as we used to, you know, when I was growing up in the 80s and before.
This is not an argument about paying less for clothing. This is an argument about wearing things more than once. So there's nothing wrong with a cheap T‑shirt but we look at an item like a T‑shirt, right. It's about six kilograms of carbon to make that T‑shirt. It's about 2,700 litres of water. The difference between wearing it once and wearing it 20 times, which is about the average, is really significant. The difference between wearing it 20 times and 60 times is really significant. So you drop the carbon emissions and water usage by more than 60 per cent if you get that wear rate up.
So choosing carefully, designing carefully, choosing carefully and getting maximum utility out of every item, that's really what we're after.
REUCASSEL: Yeah, absolutely. We're talking to the Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek. It is 13 minutes to 8.
Just very quickly, Tanya, you're the Federal Environment Minister, you're also the member for Sydney, one of the worst hit areas by the asbestos mulch crisis. Are the regulations good enough? Is there something the Federal Government can do to make this better?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, it is a shocking thing to see how widespread this asbestos problem is. It's exactly the reason that we need strong regulators like the Environment Protection Agency in New South Wales. It's also why we're establishing a Commonwealth EPA. This will be the first time that Australia has a national Environment Protection Agency and we're in the process of doing that now.
REUCASSEL: Okay. Thank you so much, Tanya, thanks for talking to us.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Thank you.
REUCASSEL: Appreciate it there. Tanya Plibersek the Federal Environment Minister and the Member for Sydney.
END
