Paper and cardboard is the one waste stream this industry cannot look away from. It is the substrate, the packaging and, increasingly, the product being displaced. The National Waste Report is where the Commonwealth measures it, and section 9.8 of the 2022 edition is four paragraphs long and worth more attention than it gets.
What the report says
About 5.76 Mt of scrap paper and cardboard was generated in 2020-21, or
224 kg per capita
, down 12 per cent from 6.19 Mt in 2016-17. About 60 per cent came
from the commercial and industrial stream.
The recovery rate is the number usually quoted, and it has been falling for fifteen
years. The report puts it at 62%, down from 72% in 2006-07 and 68% in 2016-17
.
But a rate hides the volumes, and the volumes are the story. The report's own jurisdictional table sets 2016-17 against 2020-21:
| 2016-17 | 2020-21 | change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generation | 6,189 | 5,756 | -7% |
| Recycling | 3,791 | 3,155 | -17% |
| Energy recovery | 401 | 417 | +4% |
| Disposal | 1,998 | 2,184 | +9% |
Less paper waste was produced and more of it was buried. Recycling fell by 636,000 tonnes, well over twice the fall in generation, while disposal rose by 186,000 tonnes. The recovery rate did not drift down because the trade got worse at sorting; it fell because the volume being recycled dropped much faster than the volume being made.
The report attributes the market side plainly: the scrap market has been strongly
affected by Asian restrictions on waste imports since 2017-18
.
Two states carry most of the fall
The national figure is not evenly spread. Tasmania's generation fell 53 per cent and its recycling fell 72 per cent across the four years. Victoria's recycling fell 21 per cent and South Australia's 27 per cent. New South Wales recycled 11 per cent less and sent 19 per cent more to landfill. Queensland was flat on both.
We are not going to explain those state differences from this table alone, because the report does not, and the plausible causes (a mill closure, a contract, a change in what counts as recovered) are exactly the kind of thing that needs its own sourcing.
The part that is about print, not packaging
The report is unusually direct about why the total is falling, and it is not a recycling
story at all. The decline is linked to the digitisation of information
. It quantifies
it: annual consumption of newsprint and magazine material has fallen over the last decade by
400 to 500 kt/yr, and printing and writing papers by another
300 to 400 kt/yr. And then the sentence that describes this industry's last
fifteen years in one line: Packaging papers, including cardboard, have grown strongly but
not enough to offset these major declines.
Worth flagging how that passage is sourced, because the report itself flags it. The
commentary is footnoted to Tim Woods of IndustryEdge, personal communication, 16 September
2022
. It is an expert attribution, not a series you can go and download, and it is four
years old.
How old the whole thing is
The National Waste Report 2022 was published on 16 December 2022 and last corrected on 10 February 2023. It reports 2020-21. As at today the department's own publications index lists four editions, 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022, and no later one; we also checked the file path pattern directly for 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions and each returns a 404.
So the most recent national measurement of what happens to Australia's paper and cardboard describes a financial year that ended five years ago, and the Senate committee deciding whether to recommend a mandatory extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging reports in two days.
That is not an accusation of anything. Waste data is genuinely slow, states publish their own, and APCO reports separately against the national packaging targets. But if you are a converter trying to work out what a scheme would cost you, the national picture available to you is the same one that was available in early 2023.
One thing to check rather than assume
Section 9.8 also says that From July 2024, Australia will regulate paper and cardboard
exports through the implementation of a licencing and declaration scheme
. That was
written in 2022 and the date has passed. We have not verified the scheme's current operation
or its thresholds here, and readers should not take the report's forward-looking sentence as
a description of today. It is on our list.
How we sourced this
Every figure above is from the National Waste Report 2022, which we downloaded as a PDF (142 pages) and read directly rather than from any summary. The national and state movements are our own arithmetic on the report's Table 42, which extracts cleanly with its columns aligned; the percentage changes shown are the report's own. Quoted phrases are the report's words. Publication and correction dates are from its own version history.
What we have not done. We have not read the state waste reports, APCO's separate reporting against the national packaging targets, or the IndustryEdge material behind the report's commentary on newsprint and printing paper volumes. We have not verified the current status of the paper and cardboard export licensing scheme, and we say so above rather than repeating a 2022 sentence about a 2024 start as if it described now. We have not attempted to explain the state-by-state differences, because the report does not and we have not sourced them independently. We make no claim about why no edition has been published since 2022.
Sources
- Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, National Waste Report 2022 (PDF, 142 pages, published 16 December 2022, Final version 1.2 dated 10 February 2023, downloaded and read 4 August 2026): section 9.8 on paper and cardboard including the 5.76 Mt generation figure, 224 kg per capita, the 62 per cent recovery rate and its 2006-07 and 2016-17 comparisons, the digitisation attribution and the newsprint and printing-paper volume declines, the Asian import restriction explanation, the July 2024 export licensing sentence and footnote 60; and Table 42 for the generation, recycling, energy recovery and disposal figures nationally and by state.
- Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, National Waste Reports (index read 4 August 2026): that the published editions are 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022, with no later edition listed.
Recycle or convert paper and cardboard, or reading different numbers in your own operation? Tell us and we will check it against the sources and log the outcome here.