How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter? What it really takes to create a circular economy – Australia
Posted on September 11, 2025 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingYet for all the consultation, Australia still lacks the one thing that would enable a safe and functioning circular economy: regulation.
Source: What it really takes to create a circular economy – Inside Waste
In Australia, the circular economy has become something of a buzzword – a vision celebrated in strategy papers, stakeholder workshops, and target-setting forums. Yet for all the consultation, communiqués and roundtable photo opportunities, Australia still lacks the one thing that would truly enable a safe and functioning circular economy: regulation.
In December 2024, Australia’s Environment Ministers adopted a national Circular Economy Framework, promising to lead the transition towards a sustainable society that will double Australia’s circularity rate by 2035. But the ink was barely dry before the goalposts began to shift. Ambitious 2030 targets slid to 2035. Enforceable action was absent. Accountability frameworks were unclear. And the framework remained just that – a framework – without real national legislation or state-level regulation to back it up.
In 2025, we have a new Federal Environment Minister and as the Treasurer stated in his address to the National Press Club on 18 June 2025, a government that has a focus on “productivity, budget sustainability and resilience in the face of global turmoil”.
Given that a circular economy can assist in delivering all of these, isn’t it time we asked: what will it really take to create a circular economy? It won’t be achieved through more workshops filled with butcher’s paper and feel-good declarations. Instead of aspirational statements from the curious and keen, we need to bring accountability and responsibility to the table.
I think we would all agree that there is no shortage of circular economy plans. We’ve had roadmaps, strategies, and now, a national framework. But what’s missing is enforceability. Despite the rhetoric, no government (state or federal) has enacted comprehensive regulation to ensure products entering the Australian market are circular by design or safe for re-entry into the material stream. We do have some hope with the NSW Product Lifecycle Act 2025, but as yet no other state has said they will be adopting this.
Further there has been no real progress towards national legislation that compels producers to make their products safer, more durable, and more easily repairable, or to take any responsibility when they are not. This includes the review of the Federal Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020, which was done under the cover of an election with no update on future direction or how it will in fact provide this necessary national framework.
This is not a “lack of awareness” problem. It is a lack of will and an over-reliance on voluntary action, industry partnerships, and the belief that market signals alone will shift deeply entrenched systems of linear production and consumption.
Australia’s waste management hierarchy has long focused on managing harm at the end of a product’s life. But as many in the waste and resource recovery (WARR) industry know, that’s too late. To this end, it was interesting to read that the Zero Waste International Alliance (ZWIA) has updated its Zero Waste Hierarchy of Highest and Best Use – reimagining it to incorporate a “do no harm” principle, applied not only at end-of-life, but also at the design and manufacturing stages. If we embed safety and circularity at the first instance, we eliminate the risks and costs of dealing with hazardous, non-recyclable, or short-lived products downstream.
So, what do we need to do to achieve ‘no harm’? Well, it means we need regulating:
- Materials used in products (eliminating toxins and non-recyclables).
- Design for disassembly and modularity.
- Product lifespan extension, through repairability and upgradeability.
Right now, none of this is mandatory in Australia. We have seen firsthand that voluntary approaches and even alleged ‘co-regulatory’ like what Australia has for packaging, do not get there, given the lack of level playing field or enforceable obligations.
Read more: Sloan comes out firing over Victorian CE bill
Amid national discussions of productivity reform and the Economic Reform Roundtable in August 2025, circularity is rarely mentioned. But if we are serious about aligning with planetary boundaries, material productivity – not just labour productivity – must also take centre stage. Designing systems to reuse, repair, and regenerate materials is not a niche concern, it is an economic imperative. Linear material throughput is not just wasteful, it’s risky. It makes Australia more vulnerable to supply chain shocks, energy volatility, and climate impacts. Improving material productivity means:
- Government at all levels taking real action to require public procurement to favour local recycled materials, circular-ready and repairable products;
- investing in and supporting remanufacturing and reverse logistics infrastructure;
- incentivising business models based on service, not ownership (i.e. product-as-a-service); and
- embedding circular principles into industrial design, product stewardship, and trade policy.
Australia’s approach to circularity has, until now, leaned heavily on education, co-regulation, and voluntary stewardship schemes. While important, these approaches cannot replace baseline national standards. Voluntary schemes, especially those without performance-based targets, leave us with patchy outcomes and low consumer trust. The reality is: without regulation, bad actors continue business
as usual, while responsible producers are left carrying the load. Australia urgently needs:
- National eco-design laws, modelled on the EU’s approach.
- Mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), with enforceable targets and penalties.
- A national product safety and materials register, to track and verify circular readiness.
- Consistent legislation across states, so that circular business models don’t face a patchwork of barriers.
Globally, the “circularity gap” is widening. The 2024 Circularity Gap Report found that despite growing awareness, the global economy is only 7.2 per cent circular – down from 9.1 per cent in 2018. Australia is not immune. While we increase recovery rates in some streams, we are also increasing total material consumption in others.
This paradox, going forwards while going backwards, is a symptom of systems that incentivise throughput, not reuse. And unless we address this foundational problem through policy and regulation, our circular economy will remain circular in name only.
And the reality is, as WMRR has said a million times before, the circular economy cannot sit within the environment portfolio alone. It must be a whole-of-government transformation that recognises what we do is about economics and industry, not just environment. If the Australian government is bona fide in its commitment to increase productivity, we must embed circular principles across:
- Climate policy (material efficiency reduces emissions);
- industry and innovation (to support circular manufacturing);
- health and safety (to phase out hazardous materials);
- housing and infrastructure (circular construction standards); and
- education and training (to equip a workforce for repair, reuse, and remanufacture).
This requires strong leadership and cross-portfolio collaboration at all levels of government, not the current siloed approaches, short-term grants, and fragmented strategies. The means that while the December 2024 Circular Economy Framework was a start, it cannot be the endpoint. We must now build the regulatory foundations to make circularity real at all levels of government, which means:
- Setting enforceable design and safety standards.
- Legislating producer responsibility with teeth.
- Measuring progress not just in targets set, but in harmful materials removed and durable systems built.
Workshops and visioning sessions are valuable, but they are no substitute for action.
Let’s hope this term of government is the one where we go from being ‘prepared to regulate’, to finally regulating.
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