An increase in regulation and environmental legislation has made the current regulatory approach in Australia for energy, water and waste more expensive and unnecessarily complex for the packaging industry, according to a submission by the Packaging Council of Australia (PCA) to the Government’s Productivity Commission.
In the submission, which was submitted to the government this month, the PCA says there has been a significant increase in regulation and reporting requirements for industry across the issues of energy, water and waste. However, policy debate and development in these areas has at time been in conflict with existing regulations.According to the PCA, this increase has had the effect of increasing costs, auditing and reporting for companies in the packaging industry as well as creating uncertainty and confusion, without an improvement in environmental standards or business performance.
Gavin Williams CEO of the PCA says the council’s fundamental concern is the lack of coordination and policy consistency across Federal, State and local governments.
He says, “This has given rise to overly complex regulation and the sense that data collection and reporting requirements are sometimes established for “the sake of it” without the information being used in any coherent policy way.”
In the submission, the PCA also outlines that regulation of Industry’s energy and water use has become a tangle of multiple reporting requirements that is losing sight of the objective. Regulations of concern include:
- The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act (Commonwealth)
- Energy Efficiency Opportunities Act (Commonwealth)
- Environmental Resource Efficiency Plans (Victoria)
- NSW Department of Energy, Utilities and Sustainability Energy and
- Water Action Plans (NSW)
- The Clean Energy Act (QLD)
The PCA continues that all of the above regulations, except for the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) Act have a dual purpose – to improve data gathering, transparency and reporting around energy and water use, and to place an obligation on large users to commit to reduction activities.
While the PCA supports the intent and objective of these regulations, it says the problem is that each pursues those objectives in a different manner.
For example, the thresholds differ across jurisdictions as to whether businesses have a reporting and compliance obligation. The NSW scheme requires businesses using more than 10 giga watt-hours of electricity and/or 50 mega litres of water to participate while in Victoria it is 100 tera joules of energy and/or 120 mega litres. Victoria also includes waste disposal but does not yet have a threshold tonnage.
Williams concludes, “Each State currently has differing standards of data gathering and reporting and differing time lines for both reporting and for changes to the thresholds. The impact of these differences is confusion and added costs.”
