Australia's hazardous waste infrastructure: the national facility dataset
Prepared by Rawtec for the Department of the Environment. Written by Kat Heinrich and Mark Rawson, reviewed and approved by P Howlett and Mark Rawson. 1 August 2014.
Summary published
Before this dataset existed, there was no single national picture of where Australia’s hazardous waste physically goes.
Rawtec built one: 208 facilities that receive, store, process, treat or dispose of hazardous waste in liquid, solid or sludge form, compiled from EPA databases, government registers and industry websites, then checked against state environmental authorities and the major operators.
The dataset covers at least 80% of national hazardous waste generation, or about 1.2 million tonnes.
Facilities identified nationally
Of national hazardous waste generation covered
Approximate tonnage represented
Facilities in Victoria, the most of any state
What the dataset shows
Facilities by jurisdiction
Victoria 66, New South Wales 58, Western Australia 33, Queensland 24, South Australia 15, Northern Territory 5, Tasmania 4 and the ACT 3.
Victoria's lead is partly a definitional artefact
Victoria’s 66 sites include 14 landfills that accept hazardous waste. The New South Wales figure reflects only one restricted waste landfill. So the gap between 66 and 58 is smaller in practice than it looks, and this is exactly the kind of thing a national dataset needs to state plainly rather than let readers infer.
How facilities were sized
Four capacity bands: very small at up to 1,000 tonnes a year, small at 1,001 to 5,000, medium at 5,001 to 50,000 and large above 50,000.
What the facilities do
Chemical and physical treatment, thermal processing, recycling and immobilisation, documented facility by facility.
What is deliberately out of scope
Original waste generation sites, smelters, cement kilns, tyre facilities, sewerage treatment plants, smaller transfer stations, quarantine waste facilities, and most asbestos and grease trap operations. Knowing the exclusions matters as much as the count.
How to use it, and how not to
The report states that the information does not necessarily align with the site’s licence as approved by the local EPA, and does not supersede licensing requirements. Do not treat an entry as evidence a facility may accept a given material.
There may be other sites meeting the scope that were not captured, and some facilities appear under multiple names.
The recommendation was that the Department update the dataset over time, adding facilities as they are identified. It is a baseline, not a finished census.
Eleven years on, treat the counts as historical. The value now is in the method and the scope definition rather than the current numbers.
Related reports
Other national and state infrastructure analysis.
The full report includes the facility dataset and its structure.
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