Page 2370 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 August 2016
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This legislation provides stronger encouragement for waste transportation businesses and waste treatment facilities to recycle or re-use their waste rather than simply sending it to landfill. Landfill should only be a destination for waste that cannot be recovered and recycled. That is our long-term objective.
We would like to make it clear to our waste industry that there are savings to be made and opportunities to be seized by engaging in the recycling and recovery of waste. Ultimately, businesses that recycle and recover their waste rather than sending it to landfill will pay less, making it more attractive for waste operators to recycle and recover materials.
Over time, waste charges will change and be aimed at sending effective price signals to industry and the community, and charges will be reinvested into the waste industry.
The bill establishes an effective regulatory framework for waste activity, requiring waste facilities to be licensed and waste transporters to be registered.
Knowledge about what is happening to waste is critical to the development of appropriate waste policy and processes. This legislation will require operators in the commercial waste industry to provide data on their waste activity to government agencies so that we can better understand what happens to our waste and develop strategies to minimise waste generation and encourage the recovery of resources.
Care has been taken to ensure that the licensing and registration requirements can be met with minimal red tape. This bill is a compact but comprehensive model for regulating commercial waste activity in the ACT. It has been drafted to avoid some of the complexity of legislation in larger states to put in place an effective but light-touch regulatory framework for waste management. It establishes a structure for managing waste activity and incorporates a suite of regulatory tools commonly found in this type of legislation.
Agencies will be able to guide and enforce appropriate behaviour in the waste industry and the broader community through a regulatory framework that allows the government to set licensing conditions on waste facilities to manage their risk profile; enhanced powers to identify and impose significant penalties for illegal dumping; charging a levy or some other targeted charge on the collection and disposal of waste, to encourage the recovery and reuse of materials and discourage landfill and to fund an expansion of enforcement and education activities; and, finally, mandatory reporting requirements, allowing improved monitoring of waste activity to better target waste education and enforcement activities.
The intention is that while the legislation will contain general rules about the proper storage, transporting and disposal of waste, only waste management businesses will be covered by the regulatory framework, that is, licensing, registration and reporting.
This legislation represents the waste feasibility study’s first suite of recommendations to the government on waste reform. It brings the ACT’s statutory framework to the point at which change can be introduced and managed into the future.
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