Rates of recycling found to have been falsified

A new report has revealed that the rates of recycling for cardboard and bottles have been hugely exaggerated.

In New Zealand for instance statistics were doctored to show that the rate of recycling for glass bottles had risen by seventy thousand tonnes. Also the statistics for recycling of cardboard had to be reduced by close to three hundred thousand tonnes since it was discovered that most of what had been claimed to have been cardboard packaging was printed paper and newspapers.

The inaccuracies were discovered by an independent audit of National Packaging Covenant Council of Australia which claimed that they were not deliberate.

However a coalition of environmental groups disputes that saying that it was all deliberate and the reason for giving the wrong statistics was to avoid government intervention.

The firms which are accused of cooking the figures number six hundred and are all signed up to the industry and government agreement referred to as the National Packaging Covenant. They include recycling firms such as Visy and AMCOR. Others are Woolworths, George Weston Foods and Coles.

Industry groups have in the past claimed that they helped boost the recycling habits to realise a rate of 58.3 per cent of all the 4.3 million tonnes of glass, paper, cardboard, cans and plastics that was generated annually. However independent statistics reveal that the rate of recycling had only risen to forty three per cent.

The Boomerang Alliance commented that the numbers were likely to be lower especially once the rate of recycling of plastics was re-assessed. The alliance’s spokesperson, Dave West admitted that there had been a consistent exaggeration of figures for a period spanning 5 years.