Waste and Circular Infrastructure Plan

The NSW Waste and Circular Infrastructure Plan will guide decision-making and investment in critical waste infrastructure including energy from waste.

Key landfills servicing Greater Sydney are expected to close from 2030 or earlier. This means that large volumes of waste generated by households and businesses will have no safe pathway for disposal.

We have developed the first NSW Waste and Circular Infrastructure Plan (PDF 1.7MB) to outline whole-of-government actions to boost private investment in waste infrastructure and prevent the Greater Sydney waste crisis. This plan supersedes the NSW Energy from Waste Infrastructure Plan by setting out how and why the NSW Energy from Waste Framework will be updated. 

The Plan was informed through consultation with stakeholders from local government and industry who told us:

• the planning process is difficult to navigate
• uncertainty has limited investment in new waste infrastructure.

The Plan was announced by the Minister for the Environment at the 2024 NSW Circular Economy Summit.

The NSW Waste and Circular Infrastructure Plan outlines how we will:

• streamline planning processes to unlock more capacity at existing priority landfills, where it is necessary to avoid imminent landfill shortfalls facing Greater Sydney
• update the energy from waste regulatory framework to better enable energy from waste infrastructure, where doing so will reduce our reliance on landfill and increase the resilience of NSW’s waste management system while maintaining strong protections for communities and the environment
• strategically plan for the waste infrastructure needed for essential waste services to be reliably and affordably delivered to Greater Sydney’s growing populations and new developments.

Chapter 1

The first chapter of the Plan acknowledges that even as we transition to a circular economy there will always be a portion of waste we cannot recover, for technical or economic reasons. This residual waste stream needs a safe, resilient disposal pathway that is sustainable over the long term.

Further chapters

Further chapters of the Plan are being developed. These will focus on enabling higher order recovery, recycling and reuse.