Submission to consultation for Accelerating SA’s transition to a circular economy: South Australia’s Waste Strategy 2025-2030

South Australia’s efforts to move towards a circular economy provide significant opportunities to reduce waste and pollution, maintain resource efficiency and value, and protect the integrity of natural ecosystems. Realising these opportunities requires using and enabling the best possible technological innovations in the waste management and resource recovery sectors.

ATSE’s report, Towards a Waste Free Future: Technology Readiness in Waste and Resource Recovery, outlines a pathway to move from a linear to a circular economy, identifying emerging technologies and determining the waste and resource recovery sector’s readiness for this transition.

The report provides four overarching recommendations for establishing a more robust circular economy:

1. A paradigm shift towards waste avoidance, including ensuring that products are designed for reuse, repair, parts replacement, upgrading, and trade-in for remanufacture.
2. A systems approach to resource productivity and recovery, which emphasises the role and interests of all stakeholders within a product’s lifecycle.
3. Using big data and analytics to improve information quality, transparency, and inform decision making.
4. Creating a long-term policy and regulatory framework with targeted government investment to facilitate investment certainty.

In addition to the issues discussed in Towards a Waste Free Future, ATSE also makes the following recommendations for the current consultation:

1. Legislate a ‘right to repair’ as part of the Repair strategy.
2. Develop a more comprehensive strategy for specifically addressing e-waste, the fastest growing waste stream globally, including local initiatives before a national regulated product stewardship scheme is developed.