Building on the Improving National Waste Data and Reporting report77 and the Victorian Auditor-General Office's 2019 Audit into the resource recovery sector78, Infrastructure Australia has identified key priorities for data collection and reporting, which include:
• having consistent quality assurance measures
• obtaining a higher volume of clear data about waste generation volumes by waste stream and location, including: local government waste management, product waste, tip shops, litter and dumping, container deposit schemes, mining waste, stockpiles, approved long-term storages, waste infrastructure and international waste flows
• generating datasets that analyse different community types based on geography, including Northern Australia, regional, rural and remote areas
• introducing better waste facility auditing
• improving industrial wastewater treatment infrastructure data79
• collecting detailed resource recovery facilities data including location, waste processed, capacity, capability and output
• tracking waste flows from generation to end use including collection, transfer, sorting, recycling or reuse, and disposal
• using non-weight-based measures such as carbon assessment to increase understanding of the economic, environmental and social impacts of waste
• having higher-quality inputs for refined waste management, such as existing packaging, imports and stockpile management
• being able to access comprehensive information on interstate waste transfer and cross-border flows
• reporting on hazardous and non-hazardous waste stockpiling
• producing data on markets for recycled waste and circular economy metrics80
• reporting in detail on disaster waste collection and disposal
• knowing where recovered materials go and the demand for them, including the requirements, needs and challenges of other sectors that the waste management sector can address.
Data collection should also be directed to inform waste policy on emerging challenges. One example is the increasing number of multi-unit dwellings and their high rates of waste contamination.81
Improved data would provide governments and councils with valuable information about separation and contamination rates, differing attitudes within buildings, and storage constraints.82 These could be analysed alongside urban amenity, traffic and development considerations to design solutions that reduce the amount of waste ending up in landfill.