By Jacqueline Ong

IT is beholden on industry bodies to articulate their position and steer policy, says the Waste Recycling Industry Association, Northern Territory( WRINT), and it is up to these bodies to lead the conversation, which may mean not following the political party line in certain situations.

And WRINT has put its money where its mouth is, releasing five industry plans in May in a bid to reform the Northern Territory’ s waste management and secondary resources / recycling performance. Now it wants the government, which put out its inaugural draft waste strategy in 2014, to“ walk the talk” and work with industry on some of the plans’ recommendations.

A challenging territory The NT has a number of complex demographic challenges. For one, it has a very low and sparse population compared to the other states( 244,000 according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2015 figures), which has in turn defined its waste management.

According to the Inside Waste Industry Report 2014-15, there are six licenced landfills in the territory, half of which is Aboriginal freehold land and much of the rest being pastoral land. In Darwin, where the bulk of the population resides, there is only one landfill, which does not bode well for the territory should a natural disaster occur.

Meanwhile, most remote and regional communities are served by small disposal facilities, some of them little more than trenches for burning. Additionally,

the territory has minimal recycling infrastructure, which explains its low resource recovery rate of about 9 %.

In 2014, the EPA released its first waste strategy followed by its 2015-2022 strategy released in July last year, which WRINT said was more a series of actions and management options.

“ Rather than criticise, the industry felt that since we had very good traction with our roadmap in Queensland and that manifesto has set the government there in the right direction – it isn’ t following a perfect pathway but at least it’ s following some logic and discipline – that we should embark on an NT roadmap,” WRINT executive officer Rick Ralph explained.

“ Waste management in a political context in NT, generally speaking, does not have a lot of substance. We

identified a lot of emerging waste streams that needed to be addressed such as liquid waste. And there is a certain amount of industrialisation that’ s happening and the demographic is changing so we thought we’ d give the government an industry perspective on how they could deliver their political mantra of jobs, technology, and investment. That’ s the rationale behind it … for industry to say to government, we know the landscape, we know what works, we believe if you follow this roadmap, you’ ll achieve what you aspire to achieve.”

Five plans

The industry plans seeks to do a few things: recover waste produced by significant generators across all sectors; make the best use of waste materials through the