Wine industry calls for national Container Deposit Scheme exemptions to reduce business burden

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Small wine businesses are worried about the additional administrative and financial costs of expanding the Container Deposit Scheme to include wine bottles. They want a threshold or exemptions for smaller businesses, as well as a streamlined national reporting system.

Transcript

00:00Jenny Semler's busy running this Glossop family winery, and her workload's set to increase

00:08when wine bottles are added to South Australia's container deposit scheme.

00:12The requirements for reporting are fairly onerous, you know, got very strict timelines, that

00:18sort of stuff.

00:19SA, New South Wales, Western Australia and the Northern Territory will include wine and

00:24spirit bottles in their 10 cent deposit schemes in the next two years.

00:29Queensland's already made the change.

00:31It's expected to save bottles from landfill, but Ms Semler says for every bottle sold in

00:37States with the scheme, winemakers must fill out paperwork and pay 13 cents when the bottle

00:43is collected for refund.

00:44I can see a whole lot of mum and dad producers who are not all over the compliance system falling

00:52out of it.

00:53It's a sentiment shared by others in the industry who are calling for a unified scheme

00:59and exemptions.

01:00Hopefully there can be a combination of threshold and administrative help to make it easier for

01:07people.

01:08The wine industry says it wants to make the scheme more sustainable for producers and

01:12is in talks with state governments about how that could happen.

01:16For a $40 million cost burden on our South Australian winemakers, we want to make sure that that cost

01:21is actually yielding a true return on investment.

01:24In a statement to the ABC, SA Environment Minister Lucy Hood said the state's Environment Protection

01:30Authority is exploring measures to support smaller producers, including by creating a national

01:35portal and reducing reporting requirements.

01:39Eliza Berlage, ABC News.

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