Ask yourself, can something simultaneously be waste and a resource, or are both definitions mutually exclusive?
This is a serious question.
This question triggered my first ever article in The Fifth Estate, in late 2021. The NSW EPA had published its Waste Delivery Plan to “chart our path to a safe and sustainable circular economy in NSW”.
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What triggered me to write at that time was the tone-deafness of the EPA’s paper talking about wanting to achieve a circular economy whilst talking about waste, when they ought to be mutually exclusive.
Under the NSW regulatory regime, once something is a waste, it will always be a waste. So, how can a true circular economy be achieved when we keep talking about waste? That was the issue then.
Now, some three years later, the EPA is revising its Guide to the NSW Resource Recovery Orders and Exemptions policy framework. The draft guide is a result of an internal review, which was triggered by an independent expert review of the NSW Resource Recovery Framework by Dr Cathy Wilkinson.
Dr Wilkinson’s review included 22 recommendations.
Recommendation 10 stated, “The EPA should investigate a pathway to enable an ‘end-of-waste’ outcome for suitable common, low risk recovered materials to better enable reuse, particularly for manufacturing, while ensuring the EPA can still address environmentally problematic and undesirable uses and dumping of those materials.”
Recommendations 11 and 12 also dealt with this subject.
What does that mean?
An end-of-waste pathway means that something once considered waste isn’t waste anymore. It can be called something else, like a product or a resource. This is serious because if something is waste, it falls under the jurisdiction of the EPA; if not, then it doesn’t.
The difference is meaningful!
If something is waste, the EPA can come and reverse its exemption and regulate you, order you to do things and so forth. Its powers can be quite severe, and they ought to be, if used for the right reasons.
But that’s not a way to achieve a circular economy. The idea of a circular economy is that people use waste, turn it into something useful. So, it is a secondary resource, which is then used to make products, which can re-enter the productive economy free from encumbrances.
Markets require certainty
You don’t want to buy something that is under the constant threat of the EPA turning up at your doorstep and telling you to dig out that compost you spread in your garden six weeks earlier. But that’s how NSW operates at the moment. You may have never thought about it. Now you really should.
The definition of “waste” in NSW is all-encompassing. Anything that is deposited into the environment in a way that alters the environment (that means anything anywhere, really) is a waste.
And in NSW, once a waste, always a waste. There is no way out.
Imagine you buy a gold ring for your loved one. It is made from gold recovered from e-waste. Waste!
Imagine you buy some compost at Bunnings or from your local landscaping yard, and it is made from recycled garden organics. Waste!
So what did the review of the Resource Recovery Framework achieve in relation to an end-of-waste pathway?
Nothing! No change. It wasn’t even mentioned.
This is also what is holding back a circular economy. I want to ask the EPA, “How come other jurisdictions in Australia manage to have an end-of-waste framework? How come NSW insists on a never-ending definition of waste always being waste?”
The answer I presume would be dead silence. There is no rational answer to these questions.
To make things worse, the EPA then becomes tone deaf again by stating in the review that “waste can be a valuable resource”. Seriously?
That’s exactly what makes me so furious.
This is not a policy framework review. This is pure laziness and fear of losing power.
Shame on you!
I fear the Minister for the Environment, Penny Sharpe, gets most of her briefings from the EPA.. It is high time for the Minister to have an independent advisory panel that advises and briefs the Minister on these policy issues, as it appears that the EPA is not interested in changing the current paradigm. Or, even better, take policy away from the EPA.
We need a paradigm shift.
That paradigm shift can only come about when there is some political will for change and some politician who has some guts to change things.
Is this possible, you ask?
Well, let me tell you a good news story.
NSW is the first Australian legislation to introduce extended producer responsibility for batteries after the industry experienced an increasing incidence of battery fires destroying trucks and waste facilities, nearly on a daily basis over several years.
The waste industry reports an estimated 10,000 battery-related fires a year in Australia. Especially lithium-ion batteries, which are embedded into products and are prone to catching fire once they are put into waste. If they get crushed in the collection vehicle, the lithium is exposed to oxygen and off it goes.
Obviously, political leadership is possible.
The big question now is, what does it take for that to extend to a Resource Recovery framework that is truly aligned with a circular economy? And to deliver infrastructure for residual waste, including new landfills and Energy from Waste facilities.
We cannot wait any longer. Time is of the essence, literally.