The Waste Authority conducts an annual census of the waste and recycling services provided to households and commercial premises by local governments in Western Australia. Information gathered through the census includes the quantity of materials collected, disposed of to landfill and recovered by each type of waste and recycling service offered.
Information collected for the census is used for:
- the development of policy and programs by the Waste Authority
- monitoring progress towards the municipal waste diversion targets in the Wwaste Sstrategy
- reporting to the National Environmental Protection Council on the implementation of the National Environmental Protection (Used Packaging Materials) Measure.
From 2020, the census of local government waste and recycling services will be replaced by reporting requirements under regulation 18C of the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Regulations 2008.
In 2018–19, 88 per cent of all local governments submitted a census return, all 33 local governments, and five regional councils in the Perth and Peel regions participated in the census.
Statewide, local governments collected an estimated 1.5 million tonnes of domestic waste from their residents and reported that 39 per cent of the waste collected was recovered in 2018–19. While average recovery rates were higher in the Perth and Peel regions (42 per cent) compared to elsewhere in the state (29 per cent), the highest local government recovery rate was in the City of Melville (62 per cent), which provided a food organics and garden organics (FOGO) three-bin collection system to its residents.
