Australian Economy, What do you think?

Question

I'm doing a school article on the economy of Australia, mainly focused on the new waste management scheme, but talking about other economy too.

Answer 1

Waste and recycling

Action to reduce waste, either by encouraging material efficiency, reducing the generation of waste, or enabling the recovery and reuse of discarded material is a critical element of sustainable development. The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts is developing partnerships and facilitating action with the states and industry to address these issues.

We are initially addressing issues in the following broad sectors: automotive waste (including tyres), oil recycling, the plastics industry, the electrical industry, and all industries within the packaging chain. These industries have been identified as priority areas in which the Australian Government is able to develop a national approach to achieve reduction of environmental impacts.

The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts is developing programs and responses to these sectors and issues in partnership with industry and other stakeholders. Examples of recent approaches include product stewardship in the oil industry (Product Stewardship (Oil) Act 2000), shared responsibility supported by regulation (National Packaging Covenant), and voluntary agreements for action (plastics).

In December 2004, all Australian Environment Ministers, working together as the Environment Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC), released a discussion paper titled Co-regulatory Frameworks for Product Stewardship. This paper sets out one option to support voluntary industry-led product stewardship schemes, such as those proposed by the television and tyre industries, with regulation. This 'safety-net' regulation would be designed to ensure that companies are not competitively disadvantaged by 'doing the right thing'. It would achieve this by ensuring all businesses dealing in the targeted products achieve at least the same environmental outcomes. This paper was open for public comment until 25 February 2005. Feedback will be used to inform governments' future work on co-regulation. Further information can be obtained from [e-mail].