In June, Australia’s assembled environment ministers decided to make packaging recycling guidelines mandatory, which was described by the industry as “historic”, and a “watershed moment”.

I would describe it as well overdue and about time. The so-called Australian Packaging Covenant has been in place for 24 years with its voluntary guidelines, and as Craig Reucassel is demonstrating in the ABC’s War on Waste series, nothing much has happened.

The stated aim was to have 70 per cent of all packaging recycled by 2025; it’s currently 13 per cent.

Membership of the covenant is voluntary and expensive, so a lot of companies don’t bother, and the rules are voluntary.

The communique from the environment ministers’ meeting in June put no time frame on making them mandatory; they just agreed that a timeline would be set, sometime, and they would meet again next year to consider a roadmap for harmonising kerbside collections.

It has been, and remains, an abysmal go-slow in managing an urgent problem.

We’re drowning in plastic because the companies that make and sell the stuff aren’t being told how much recycled content to include, or to ensure that their products are easily recycled or to take responsibility for the packaging once it leaves them. So naturally they do what suits them and their profits.

What’s needed, apart from mandatory minimum recycled content, is a mandatory cash-deposit scheme for every form of packaging.

There’s another aspect of garbage regulation that is also a mess: Methane.

Endless, destructive seepage

There are about 1000 landfills in Australia out of which methane quietly drifts into the atmosphere, night and day, from the decomposing organic material in them.

Methane only lasts 10 to 20 years in the atmosphere whereas carbon dioxide last for centuries, but the bad news more than cancels the good – it’s a far more intense and effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and it can’t be sequestered in trees. Photosynthesis only works with carbon dioxide.

There have been half-hearted attempts to regulate landfill gas since the early 1990s. In 2011 the National Waste Policy imposed the carbon price on landfill emissions, but not from waste deposited before 2012 or to those with less than 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. And then the scheme was repealed by the Abbott government in 2014.

Now the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) issues Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) to businesses that collect and remove the methane from landfills, either by flaring it or by generating electricity.

And so an industry has developed to collect ACCUs by capturing landfill gas, but a lot of them are getting paid twice for doing what they would have done anyway, either because the Environment Protection Authority requires it of the council, or because they want to sell electricity.

The problem lies in the baselines being used by the ERF. The baseline is the percentage of methane you have to collect and remove before you start being issued with ACCUs.

The idea is that these companies should only be paid for additional abatement, so the ACCUs they sell to the big emitters for offsetting their carbon dioxide emissions actually do result in less greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

The default baseline is 30 per cent, but existing landfill gas projects have been allowed to carry over their historic baselines into the new regime.

The baseline doddle

The result is that while some have baselines as high as 66 per cent, the 20 largest projects have baselines of 24 per cent and some have zero – that is, they get ACCUs for every tonne of methane they capture, even though the council is paying them and they are also selling electricity produced by it.

Some projects are, in short, making out like bandits while not removing additional greenhouse gas. Others, with high baselines, are doing the right thing.

Professor Ian Chubb’s review of the ACCUs system in December made a couple of recommendations about this: That the baselines should be “upward sloping” (higher for large-scale projects), that the baselines for existing projects should be adjusted during their lifetimes, and that “arrangements should be made for the early review and voluntary adjustment to the baseline of existing projects”.

There’s that word again – voluntary. As if anyone’s going to volunteer to get less money!

In its implementation plan for the Chubb Review, the government said it has established a technical working group, and that changes would be subject to consultation and feedback.

In other words, it will be a lobbyists’ picnic.

I suppose what’s needed to inject some urgency into these discussions is the sort of heatwave being experienced in Europe and Middle East this year – with temperatures of 45 to 50 degrees Celsius. Maybe we’ll get that this summer.

As for forcing packaging companies to use more recycled content, and to ensure that their plastic containers aren’t contaminated with other materials like paper and aluminium to ensure they can be cost-effectively recycled, that just requires political courage.

In 100 years or so, those of us who are left, living away from the heat in underground homes on higher ground, will reflect on the 200-year fossil fuel era from 1850 to 2050 with mixed feelings.

Oil, coal, gas and plastics from fossilised plants were a blessing, then a curse on civilisation.

How humanity lives in future will depend on how today’s governments deal with the curse.

Alan Kohler writes twice a week for The New Daily. He is finance presenter on ABC News and founder of Eureka Report