The Environment Will Be Saved When People Can Make Money From It

A few years ago, I was involved in the planning of a scheme to collect plastic silage wrap from farms and get it to a recycler. On paper, it made sense. Farmers wanted it gone. Some recyclers were willing to take it. Everyone agreed it was the right thing to do.

It never got off the ground. Not because anyone lacked goodwill, but because the transport cost of getting bulky, low-value plastic off scattered rural properties and into a recycling stream made landfill the cheaper, easier option every time. Good intentions don’t move a truck. Money does.

I have seen this pattern play out across the waste sector for 25 years, and it’s not really a story about apathy or bad actors. It’s a story about incentives. A mate of mine, who has spent his career in the infrastructure / environmental puts it more bluntly than I would: “the environment will be saved when people can make money from it.” I have come to think he’s right, and that producer responsibility policy needs to take that idea seriously rather than treat it as cynicism.

Recycling and product stewardship programs that rely on goodwill tend to work well while they’re novel, well-funded, or convenient. That’s exactly when the appetite for participation is highest. But goodwill isn’t a durable input. The moment a scheme costs money, time, or effort that isn’t matched by a benefit, participation drops away not because people stopped caring, but because caring was never going to be enough on its own. We shouldn’t be surprised when voluntary schemes underperform. They were built on the one input that predictably runs out first.

The same is true of programs, however well-intentioned, that depend on government grants rather than a durable funding model. A grant gets something started. It rarely keeps it running. When the money stops, so does the project — and that outcome is entirely predictable, not a failure of the idea itself.

Contrast this with rooftop solar. Australia has one of the highest household solar uptake rates in the world, and it wasn’t driven by an environmental awakening. People installed panels because the payback period made sense — lower power bills, feed-in tariffs, a financial case that stacked up. The environmental benefit came along for free. Nobody had to be convinced to care more; they just needed the economics to work, and adoption followed at genuine scale.

That’s the model producer responsibility should be learning from. Not appealing harder to conscience but building financial structures where doing the right thing and doing the cheap thing are the same choice.

Three areas where this needs to show up:

First, we need to stop designing schemes around the assumption of ongoing voluntary participation and instead build the funding model in from day one before a program launches, not after it quietly fails.

Second, the cost of managing a product at end of life needs to sit with the producer, structurally and deliberately, not as an afterthought or a penalty, but as the mechanism that finally removes the burden from local and state government budgets that were never sized to carry it. This is the practical core of extended producer responsibility not a moral argument, a financial one.

Third, the financial architecture of a scheme deserves the same rigour as its environmental design. Too often the environmental case is treated as sufficient justification on its own, while the funding model is assumed to sort itself out. My silage wrap project is a small example of what happens when it doesn’t.

None of this requires shaming producers, councils, or the businesses caught in the middle. Most of the people working in this space are trying hard, often with real constraints, and often doing quietly good work with the tools they’ve got. The point isn’t that people need to try harder or care more. It’s that we keep building schemes that depend on both and then act surprised when the money runs out and old habits return.

My mate’s line stays with me because it reframes the whole problem usefully: stop asking how to convince people to do the right thing, and start asking how to make the right thing the profitable thing. Solar answered that question. Producer responsibility can too but only if the financial case is built as deliberately as the environmental one.

Keiran Travers
Managing Director
Harbak Consulting