Paper recycling fell 17 per cent while paper waste fell 7, and the newer national reports show the slide went on

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 Commonwealth measures it in its national waste report, renamed the National waste and resource recovery report from the 2024 edition, 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:

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.

The report explains two of them, in sections we should have read the first time. For Tasmania it cautions against reading the number at all: variations between reporting years have been affected by inconsistencies in reporting. For Victoria it gives a cause and a date. In October 2019, changes in global commodity markets led to service disruptions for household recycling services and the collapse of Victoria’s largest recycler, SKM Recycling. That failure impacted the ability of 35 of Victoria’s 79 councils to sort their kerbside recyclable collections, and it falls inside the four years this table compares. New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia are not explained in theirs, and we have not sourced those independently.

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 data was, and what we missed

The National Waste Report 2022 was published on 16 December 2022 and last corrected on 10 February 2023. It reports 2020-21. When we first published we said no later edition existed. Two did, under a new name: the 2024 edition reporting 2022-23, and, since 22 September 2026, the 2026 edition reporting 2024-25. The department now says the report will come out each financial year from 2026, where it was previously every two years.

So the national picture is less stale than we said, and it is not kinder. Generation of paper and cardboard rose 1.9 per cent between 2022-23 and 2024-25, the 2026 edition says, and the recovery rate held at about 55 per cent. Over the longer run the slide this story describes kept going.

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.

Sources

How we put this together. AI systems researched and wrote it under our standing editorial rules, taking its facts from the primary sources below. How The Print Register works.

1. 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.
2. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, National Waste Reports index (read 4 August 2026, since removed): it listed the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 editions under the old name and not the renamed series, which is how we missed the 2024 edition.
3. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, National waste and resource recovery report 2024 (PDF, 104 pages, Final, dated 20 January 2025, read 1 November 2026): the edition reporting 2022-23.
4. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, National waste and resource recovery report 2026 (web page, published 22 September 2026, read 1 November 2026): paper and cardboard in 2024-25, 4.9 Mt generated, 179 kg per capita, 2.4 Mt recycled, the 55 per cent recovery rate, the 1.9 per cent rise since 2022-23 and the falls since 2016-17; annual reporting from 2026.

Corrected 5 August 2026. As published, this story said we would not explain the state differences “because the report does not”. That was wrong about the report. Re-reading it in full, section 11.6, the Tasmanian perspective, speaks directly to those figures: variations between reporting years have been affected by inconsistencies in reporting, it has been difficult to discern meaningful trends in waste data, and the data had largely been reported voluntarily. So Tasmania’s 72 per cent fall should not be read as a 72 per cent real-world collapse without further sourcing: the state’s own contribution to the report flags the underlying data as inconsistent. The figures themselves are unchanged and correct, being the report’s own jurisdictional table. What changed is two sentences that mischaracterised the source, the one above and the equivalent line in the sourcing note. Extended the same day: reading the remaining per-jurisdiction sections showed the report also explains Victoria, whose largest recycler collapsed in October 2019, so that paragraph now carries both rather than Tasmania alone. New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia remain unexplained in theirs. Worth having with it: the same section records that Tasmania passed the Waste and Resource Recovery Act 2022, that its first landfill levy commenced on 1 July 2022, and that the legislation mandates the compulsory submission of waste data by the operators of landfill and resource recovery facilities from that date. Tasmanian waste reporting became compulsory only after the period this report covers.

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.