Abstract
With increased construction activities in capital cities of Australia, the sustainable management of construction and demolition (C&D) has become an important item in the federal and state government agendas. According to the universally accepted concept of waste hierarchy waste disposal is the worst preferred waste management option due to environmental issues. Currently, in most Australian jurisdictions, a landfill levy is applied to discourage waste disposal and to further encourage waste recovery. However, there is an ongoing debate as to whether the levy regime could achieve the desired outcome. Therefore, this study, funded by the Australian Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre, explored the effectiveness of the current landfill levy across Australian jurisdictions. The paper presents the findings of this study that were obtained from a questionnaire survey aiming to capture the main C&D waste management stakeholders on landfill taxing imposition in Australia. The study collected 132 responses from professionals in the construction industry and other industries dealing with C&D waste management and resource recovery. The results demonstrated that those who believed in market incentive approaches outweigh people that were in favour of pecuniary impost approach. Among those who favoured pecuniary imposts, almost 90% of participants agreed with the effectiveness of landfill levies in any waste management system. Other results provided a useful insight into the actual implications of the current levy scheme. It is expected that the findings in this study contribute to developing sound policies that provide a level field for all key stakeholders and to ensure that resource recovery is further encouraged.
Highlights
Construction activities in Australian cities have substantially grown over the recent decades leading to the generation of a large amount of waste [1]
To add to the complexity, recent anti-waste movements by foreign countries such as China, Thailand, Philippines and Malaysia that ban the import of recyclable from developed nations [4,5] has left Australia with alarming rates of waste stockpiling [6,7]. This is mainly because the waste producers can no longer avoid landfill levies or recovery operation fees by shipping waste overseas. This policy only focuses on certain types of metals, textiles, plastic and cardboards used in packaging and not all Construction and demolition (C&D) waste, the announced level of acceptable contamination is a real hurdle to the export of C&D waste from Australia
In terms of the length of experience working in C&D waste space, as shown in Table 1, about 44% of participants had less than six years, and only less than 30% of them worked in an industry related to C&D waste management more than 15 years at the time of running the survey
Summary
Construction activities in Australian cities have substantially grown over the recent decades leading to the generation of a large amount of waste [1]. To add to the complexity, recent anti-waste movements by foreign countries such as China, Thailand, Philippines and Malaysia that ban the import of recyclable from developed nations [4,5] has left Australia with alarming rates of waste stockpiling [6,7]. This is mainly because the waste producers can no longer avoid landfill levies or recovery operation fees by shipping waste overseas. Some Australian organisations have claimed that the ban diminishes the ability of material recovery facility (MRF) operators to market sorted recyclables, and stockpiling and more landfilling is likely to occur [8]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
