Commercial and industrial waste audit 2023

The audit gives insight into the materials that are sent to landfill by businesses in different regions of NSW.

Visual audits were done on over 1,500 C&I waste loads delivered to 14 landfills and transfer stations across NSW.  A sample of over 3,500 garbage bags were taken from these loads and audited to give insight into the composition of bagged waste.

The audit only covers waste sent to landfill by businesses and institutions. It doesn’t include household waste or, construction and demolition waste or materials that are recycled.

Results summary

  • Four materials account for just over 70% of waste sent to landfill by businesses in NSW:
    • organics 25.4%
    • waste processing residues 16.2%
    • plastics 15.3%
    • paper and cardboard 13.4%
  • 35% of C&I waste sent to landfill is recyclable.
  • 53% of C&I waste is made up of materials that are likely to be recyclable in the future if improvements are made to the availability of collection services, source separation, waste and recycling processing infrastructure and/or markets for recovered materials.
  • 45% of C&I waste sent to landfill is in garbage bags.

Explore the data

 

Launch the dashboard

The audit allows government and industry to identify opportunities to recover materials that could be recycled instead of landfilled. This information is needed to drive the shift to a circular economy and to implement activities to achieve the National Waste Policy Action Plan target of an average 80% resource recovery by 2030.

This is the most comprehensive analysis of commercial and industrial (C&I) waste ever undertaken in NSW. Findings are available:

  • at state level
  • for the two regulated  areas of NSW, the metropolitan levy area (MLA) and regional levy area (RLA) and for the non-levied area (NLA)
  • for 9 regional groupings of councils.