In September 2017, the Department of the Environment and Energy commissioned Blue Environment and sub-consultants to manage its waste data and reporting needs until 2019. An early project requirement was to research and propose improvements to the previous versions of the core waste reports, particularly the national waste report. The work program to explore potential areas for improvement involved consultations with the states and territories, industry and community, as well as various reviews and research projects. An initial version of this report proposed a series of changes. A workshop to discuss these was held at the Department’s offices on 19 March. The workshop and subsequent discussions resulted in an agreed set of improvements on how national waste reporting should be improved. This report documents the method and outcomes of the improvements program, including the agreed improvements.

After an introduction in Section 1, a situation review in Section 2 describes the history and current status of national waste reporting, discusses why improvements are needed and canvasses potential areas of improvement. Section 3 describes the various investigations and their findings. Section 4 presents the agreed improvements. Sixty-five agreed improvements are documented, mostly focusing on the National Waste Report 2018. The improvements encompass expansions to the scope, corrections and adjustments, better expression of uncertainty, improved data warehousing, a new approach to data visualisation, standardising non-hazardous waste data and reporting, and improvements to hazardous waste data and reporting.

Among the most significant changes are: • inclusion of data on local government waste management, product waste, tip shops, litter and dumping, container deposit schemes, mining waste, stockpiles, approved long-term storages, waste infrastructure and international waste flows • increasing the depth of the detail and discussion, particularly of the key data areas of waste generation, recycling, energy recovery and disposal • restructuring the national waste report to focus on these key data areas and remove the distinct sections on each state and territory (whilst maintaining and reporting state and territory data) • construction of a flat database including the historical record of waste back to 2006-07 and interaction with that database using Power BI to generate data visualisations • a contribution towards national standardisation of waste data and reporting by appendicising the national method and definitions as a basis for a potential future standard • a range of improvements to hazardous waste data, including to correction methods, the historical record and the major publications that deal with hazardous waste. A draft table of contents for the National Waste Report 2018 is given on page 57.