What can Australia learn from overseas experiences when relating the resource recovery/waste industry? Quite a bit, according to a panel put together to discuss the subject at a recent event in Melbourne.
Read More
Select Committee recommends PFAS phase out
The Senate Select Committee on PFAS, chaired by Senator Lidia Thorpe, has released its final report, after more than a year examining PFAS contamination and risk mitigation.
Read More
NSW govt and ACCC to utilise AI to crack down on cartel behaviour
Companies that collude to inflate prices on government contracts are being put on notice, as the NSW Government and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) join forces to stamp out cartel-like
Read More
Read More
What it really takes to create a circular economy
In Australia, the circular economy has become something of a buzzword – a vision celebrated in strategy papers, stakeholder workshops, and target-setting forums. Yet for all the consultation, communiqués and roundtable photo opportunities, Australia still lacks the one thing that would truly enable a safe and functioning circular economy: regulation.
Read More
The state of packaging recycling
It looks like we need to wait until after the next election to get action on packaging. While Minister Tania Plibersek and the State Ministers talked about making the packaging industry responsible for their wastes (9 June 2023 press release) very little has happened since.
Read More
Hitting the NSW waste targets is good politics
On 1 November 2024, during the NSW Circular Economy Summit in Sydney, the Minister for environment Penny Sharpe and the CEO of the NSW EPA Tony Chappel in separate landmark speeches said “NSW has a waste crisis and we are here to fix it”… or words to that effect (my emphasis). Most in the audience breathed a sigh of relief that finally someone was listening and going to act upon repeated warnings that NSW is in trouble. Waste disposal options in Sydney are nearing critical shortage while the State has fallen behind in delivering on the National Waste Targets set in 2019.
Read More
Government mandated procurement needs to be the norm
According to the Oxford Reference Dictionary, among several other meanings, the word ‘procurement’ refers to the ‘purchase of goods and services by the public sector at all levels of government’.
Read More