Victoria banned e-waste from landfill. What changed?

From 1 July 2019, Victorian landfills stopped accepting anything with a plug or a battery, and the state became the test case the rest of Australia has watched since. The ban’s effect is real and narrower than its announcement suggested. Victoria changed the legal status of e-waste on a given date, and the tonnage got decided somewhere else, by a national scheme whose targets and funding were never Victoria’s to set. What changed in the state was the liability; the recycling was already happening, and it continued at roughly the national rate.

The national framework is what actually carries the material, and it predates the ban by the better part of a decade. Australia is the only country in the South Pacific with e-waste-specific legislation, the first National Waste Policy dates from 2009, and the Product Stewardship Act 2011 established the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme, the country’s main co-regulatory instrument, operated by approved organisations. In the financial year 2020-21 that scheme collected 50.5 million kilograms of televisions and computers and reported a maximum recovery rate of 96.7 per cent, and its recycling target rose from 50 to 70 per cent between 2015 and 2022 with 80 per cent aimed at by 2035. Those are national achievements in which Victoria’s prohibition is a supporting detail rather than the mechanism.

The network the scheme runs through is more substantial than the phrase collection points implies. The Monitor’s account of Australia records more than 697 permanent drop-off sites alongside one-off collection events, with coverage in urban and remote locations alike, and five approved organisations operating under the co-regulatory arrangement. That is a national logistics system assembled to suit a sparse continent, and it is the asset the Victorian ban relies on, because a landfill prohibition only works if a household has somewhere to take the material, and Australia built the somewhere before the prohibition rather than after it. The states that followed Victoria’s lead were able to do so precisely because that national network was already standing.

Australia generated 583 million kilograms of e-waste in 2022, 22.4 kilograms per person, and documented formal collection of 292 million kilograms, which is about half and gives Oceania its 41.4 per cent documented rate, second only to Europe’s 42.8. The Global E-waste Monitor notes the Oceania rate is an improvement on the 9 per cent recorded in 2008, which is the scale of the distance travelled. The national picture explains the Victorian one: a state ban sits on top of a national scheme that funds the categories it covers, and the categories it does not cover are the ban’s blind spot.

The ban is now well into its first measured period, and two things have moved around it. The national scheme’s target climbs to 80 per cent by 2035, which will require collection capacity the current drop-off network does not yet have everywhere, and the world’s documented collection rate is projected to fall to 20 per cent by 2030 as global generation outruns collection. Australian generation per person is now above the European average and among the highest recorded in the international dataset, which means the material arriving at Victorian transfer stations per resident is greater than in almost any other country, and rising rather than falling.

The other state-level effect of the ban is on councils and their contractors, who received the diverted material and had to build the handling for it. What arrives at a transfer station changed in volume and character after 2019, because a prohibition’s enforcement falls on the gate rather than on the household, and a gate costs more to staff than a bin. Victoria’s experience is the useful reference for the states considering the same instrument, because it establishes the sequence that works: the national scheme and its drop-off network first, the prohibition second, and the local handling capacity in between, which is the part that has to be paid for continuously since a gate is a standing cost.

The Victorian ban needs the national scheme to expand beyond televisions and computers, because a landfill prohibition on categories nobody is funded to collect transfers the cost to councils and their ratepayers rather than to the producers who designed the equipment. The Product Stewardship Act’s co-regulatory mechanism should be extended to the categories now arriving at transfer stations in the largest volumes, small appliances, tools, and the battery-bearing equipment the coming decade will deliver in increasing quantity, and the drop-off network, which the Monitor describes as genuinely dense in urban and remote locations alike, needs funding to match the prohibition. A ban can say what may not be buried; only a funded scheme can say what will be collected.

For traders, the Australian stream is well documented and unusually well processed, and the national scheme’s recovery rate above 96 per cent for its covered categories is the standard the rest of the stream gets measured against. The metals carry world economics: the Monitor values 2022’s global e-waste metals at 91 billion US dollars, with current management realising 28 billion of that, and Australia’s half-share documented rate puts it in the upper band of what is measured anywhere. Sustainability Victoria holds the detail of the state’s ban, and the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water holds the national schemes and the Product Stewardship Act, while documented material from the stream moves through platforms such as scrap.trade.

Victoria’s landfill ban did one important thing, which is to make e-waste someone’s problem to solve rather than a hole to fill in. The solving is being done by a national scheme Victoria did not design and cannot direct, and the honest lesson of the ban’s first years is that prohibitions move problems while funded schemes move tonnage.