Grape growers quitting wine across the Riverland are being left with piles of copper-chrome-arsenate-treated posts they cannot legally recycle, mulch, or burn, while licensed landfills charge general waste rates of up to $400 a tonne. That is according to Tim Whetstone, the Chaffey MP, who met Riverland Barrel Pruners and Harvesting owner Tate Milne on Friday and said the State Government’s response is not fixing the problem.
“There are currently 30 million pine posts sitting in piles,” Whetstone said, putting the bulk of them in the Riverland and calling for designated collection areas until a purpose is found for the timber.
“Most of the time, farmers are just having to leave them in piles,” Milne said, with his crews clearing blocks for growers moving into almonds and pistachios, and the posts are the single biggest obstacle for anyone trying to clear a block.
Treatment with copper chrome arsenate closes off every cheap option, with South Australian law barring the posts from being recycled, mulched, or burned, leaving licensed landfill as the only legal destination. Rawtec identified arsenic, chromium, and copper leaching, alongside dust contamination and fire hazards, as the principal risks posed by the uncontrolled stockpiles now accumulating across the state.
Government decisions drove the downturn behind the removals, on Whetstone’s argument, with the trade dispute that closed the Chinese market to Australian wine, leaving growers to carry the cost of transition on their own blocks. He wants collection points and designated storage areas established before any long-term use for the timber is settled.
Parliament heard the government’s response last month, with Primary Industries and Regional Development Minister Clare Scriven describing the first stream of the South Australian Wine Recovery Program as targeting waste from vineyards already abandoned or removed. “This is addressing the reuse, recovery, management and safe disposal of treated timber,” Scriven said.
Developing a national stewardship framework fell to the Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence in April 2026, she told Parliament, with the not-for-profit charged with covering the reuse, recovery, and safe disposal of treated timber across every sector that uses it. Scriven also cited the Rawtec work, which assessed more than 500 South Australian sites before shortlisting 15 existing waste handling operations across five wine regions, the Riverland and Limestone Coast among them.
Rawtec counted posts still in the ground rather than those already pulled, with the April 2025 study estimating 35 million CCA-treated posts standing in South Australian vineyards and up to 1.8 million coming out each year due to breakage alone. Vineyard removals add to that annual figure, and the Timber Circularity Project has mapped more than 27 million posts already stockpiled nationally.
A working alternative has already run in the field, with the FABAL Group’s mobile unit stripping clips, staples, and nails from stockpiled posts before a guillotine cuts them to length for resale as agricultural fencing or landscape timber. The National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life ran the pilot with Wine Australia and Forest and Wood Products Australia, and took the completed trials to a Langhorne Creek showcase in May.
“We really need to find a solution for treated timber in a circular economy,” Penelope Mitchell said, with the research fellow leading the project and setting the 20 years or more a treated post returns beside the heavier overall impact of switching to concrete, steel, or plastic.
