Over the 2019 summer break, our family went to Australia to visit some family. We decided to record what we noticed about the Australian ways of dealing with pollution and litter. We actually found out some interesting details!!
What We Observed
From what we observed during our stay in Australia (June-July), the country as a whole is more advanced in the reduce, reuse, and recycling department. Firstly, not only were paper straws frequently in use in many varieties of places where we were, but many of the restaurants and fast food joints had taken to using recycled cardboard for the cutlery. We also observed that next to almost every single garbage can on the street, was a recycling bin complete with the sign to show which items are acceptable recyclables and which aren’t. (We mostly stayed in the cities, however, when we did go into the suburbs of Melbourne, the arrangement of the bins was the same.)
Additionally, the few plastic bags we saw in the hands of passersby had the recycling sign on each and every one of them. It included a reminder to the person using it to recycle when finished with it. Most people had their own reusable bags for when they got groceries. Overall, the use of plastic bags was reduced.
Many of the main attractions in the cities we visited had big signs to encourage people to go plastic-free. For example, the Queen Victoria Markets in the heart of the city of Melbourne decided to go plastic bag free from May 14th, 2019 and has been going strong. The 17 1/2 acre market, which is the largest open-air market in the Southern Hemisphere, has about 9 million people wandering its aisles yearly. If the average person uses about 700 bags a year, then the market has saved about 175,550,000 (One hundred 75 billion, 5 hundred and 50 thousand :0) plastic bags so far and still going strong, saving about 50,000 bags a day.
Furthermore, Australia has an Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) — Australia’s national environment law — which makes it an offense for any person to take an action that is likely to have a significant impact on matters protected by the Act, unless they have the approval of the Australian environment minister. That was pretty interesting to find out!!
We only stayed there for a month, so technically there were places and things that we didn’t see but are in effect. We encourage you to travel and see what the rest of the world has done in terms of protecting the environment and we encourage you to comment what you discover.