Mr. Sean Scott:

I thank the Chair. There are a couple of points here. On efficiencies, we want to be more efficient ourselves. We have developed our own approaches through the national waste management plan with our structures. We have a structure around planning and circularity and then one around regulation and enforcement. As for trying to be more efficient, we have the waste enforcement regional authorities or regional waste enforcement offices. We have signed a service level agreement with all 31 local authorities that allows those three offices to work across the whole country on enforcing the permit conditions of the, as I understand it, 51 waste collection permit holders to try to encourage the achievement of our targets. It is a continual improvement process. Again, it is about achieving our targets and trying to be more sustainable in our consumption.

Mr. McLaughlin talked about trying to prevent waste at the outset and trying to be more sustainable. It is as much about that as it is about our targets. That is the efficiency side of it. It is important to point out we work collaboratively with the Department, the EPA and industry, especially on issues of waste capacity. We have a finite capacity. We thermally treat, through waste-to-energy or cement kilns, about 1 million tonnes of our waste.

We landfill about 400,000 tonnes and the rest is exported. That was raised in our opening statement. It poses us a serious challenge because we are exposed to that whole dynamic around export. As we said, waste is increasing. Part of the reason we want to reduce the amount of waste is to reduce the dependency on export and try to use the facilities we have on this island to maximum benefit. With that in mind, we have a waste capacity working group in place that meets on a quarterly basis with the industry and regulators. We do horizon scanning to try to see what issues are around the corner, manage the infrastructure we have on the island and ensure we have sufficient capacity to export on an annual basis.