Latest articles

A number of Australia wide resource recovery sector grants are currently open.

Karinne Taylor critically reviews the House Committee on Industry, Innovation, Science and Resources report “From Rubbish to Resources: Building a Circular Economy”.

Landfilled organics result to significant GHG emissions and a waste of valuable nutrients. Banning the landfilling of household and commercial food and garden waste would stimulate jobs growth, divert millions of tonnes from landfill, generate compost, sequester carbon in soils and reduce Australia's GHG footprint.

Australians want to take care of the environment. We have set a national resource recovery target of 80% by 2030. How do we achieve these goals? Well, we cannot go wrong with a nationwide landfill levy.

MRA has turned 10. A big thank you to all of our clients, friends and colleagues for supporting MRA over these first ten years. We couldn't have done it without you. To mark the occasion, Mike Ritchie looks back on the key points of waste reform, highlighting our successes and identifying key targets for the future.

Resource recovery sector grants have recently opened in NSW and Victoria while a recycling and clean energy Federal manufacturing grant is due to open soon.

Waste is ‘waste’ by definition of the fact it is discarded. The generator has to pay someone to get rid of it. Ιt will only become a ‘resource’ when it is separated, sorted, cleaned-up and is available as an input to another process.

Landfill levies may be blunt instruments but they have also shown their effectiveness in Australia. Waste generators have a binary decision to make. Recycle or landfill. More often than not, it comes down to price. To meet our 80% diversion from landfill target, we need to make the answer to that question simple and ever present.

In the days before CDS, containers made up half of the volume of most Australian kerbside bins. Post-CDS, yellow top bins are not as full anymore. That creates opportunities for new products to go into the yellow bin system. Mike Ritchie discusses our options for increasing recycling.

Waste is like a river that flows downhill to the cheapest price. Landfills are like big vacuum cleaners - they suck up waste and resources indiscriminately. If we continue to supply cheaply priced landfills, then that is where our waste will go. There will always be a place for well-run landfills. But if we want to create a circular economy, then the first and most obvious thing we need to do, is stop the one-way flow into landfills.

The NSW DPIE conducted an excellent review of FOGO performance across 34 Councils in NSW. Average performance is a poor indicator of the trends in FOGO so Mike Ritchie, re-analysed the data to look at individual Council performance and summarised his findings in an informative article.