Tamworth Regional Council defines waste management as the practices and procedures or the administration of activities that provide for the collection, source separation, storage, transportation, transfer, processing, treatment, and disposal of waste.
There are many terms used in waste management and with sustainability. For more information on waste terminology or sustainability definitions, please view the glossary of terms.
There are a number Acts which Council’s are obligated to follow and comply to. These include:
The Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Act 2001, has the following objectives:
- to encourage the most efficient use of resources and to reduce environmental harm in accordance with the principles of ecologically sustainable development
- to ensure that resource management options are considered against a hierarchy of the following order:
- avoidance of unnecessary resource consumption
- resource recovery (including reuse, reprocessing, recycling and energy recovery)
- disposal
- to provide for the continual reduction in waste generation
- to minimise the consumption of natural resources and the final disposal of waste by encouraging the avoidance of waste and the reuse and recycling of waste
- to ensure that industry shares with the community the responsibility for reducing and dealing with waste
- to ensure the efficient funding of waste and resource management planning, programs and service delivery
- to achieve integrated waste and resource management planning, programs and service delivery on a State-wide basis
- to assist in the achievement of the objectives of the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997
The Waste Hierarchy
The waste hierarchy is a list of approaches to managing waste to preserve community resources and is arranged in order of the most desirable option to the least desirable option. Below is a graphical representation of the hierarchy.
The waste hierarchy is widely used as a simple communication tool to convey that:
- strategies which seek to avoid or reduce products becoming waste are generally preferable to
- strategies which seek to find a use for waste, which are in turn generally preferable to
- strategies for disposal at landfill, which should be used as a last resort