Call her Priya, a composite of the roughly 6,000 households the ACT government picked, by postcode, to trial its Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) service in parts of Belconnen, Bruce, Cook, Macquarie and a handful of Tuggeranong apartment blocks (ACT Government, FOGO pilot documentation; CMTEDD media release, 2024). Every week Priya wheels out a lime-green bin of food scraps and garden trimmings that would otherwise rot in landfill and emit methane; every week it is collected and turned into compost. Her sister across town in Kambah has no such bin, and will not get one for years yet. Both households were promised, under the Parliamentary and Governing Agreement struck after the 2020 election, that food waste collection would start territory-wide from 2023. It did not. The industrial composter needed to process it at scale is still being procured, and the government's own timeline now points to 2026 — three years late, and a full 15 years after the ACT first wrote down a 90%-diversion target it has never come close to meeting.
That gap between ambition and delivery is not confined to food waste. The ACT was an early and genuine leader on container recycling, and its bottle-and-can scheme is one of the better-run programs in the country. But its only Materials Recovery Facility burned to the ground on Boxing Day 2022, its household recycling contamination is high enough that a NoWaste audit found nearly one in ten items in the general-waste bin should have gone in yellow, and its flagship strategy target — more than 90% of everything diverted from landfill by 2025 — has been sitting at roughly 73% for years (ACT NoWaste, kerbside audit data; National Waste and Resource Recovery Report 2024, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), 2022-23 data). Waste is a small budget line next to health or housing. It is also one of the clearest places to check whether a government's stated ambition and its actual delivery move at the same speed.
What the government did
The ACT government's waste framework rests on three main pillars, built up over more than a decade. The first is the ACT Waste Management Strategy 2011–2025: Towards a Sustainable Canberra, which set the territory's headline target: resource recovery exceeding 90% and, eventually, no recoverable material going to landfill at all, by 2025 (ACT Government, Environment and Sustainable Development Directorate, 2011). The second is the ACT Container Deposit Scheme (CDS), launched on 30 June 2018 under the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Act 2016, which pays a 10-cent refund on eligible drink containers returned through a network of Return-It points and kerbside co-collection, delivered by scheme coordinator Exchange for Change and network operator Return-It (ACT Government, CDS scheme documentation). The third, newer pillar is the ACT Circular Economy Strategy and Action Plan 2023–2030, which widens the frame from "where does the rubbish go" to "how much rubbish gets created in the first place," and the Circular Economy Act 2023, which was intended to require larger businesses to separate their organics and recycling and hold a food-waste reduction plan (ACT Government, City Services, 2022 and 2023).
Sitting underneath all three is the promise, repeated in successive Labor-Greens Parliamentary and Governing Agreements, to build a household food-organics collection service. A pilot began years ago and was expanded to roughly 6,000 households by 2024; a purpose-built FOGO processing facility, designed to handle up to 50,000 tonnes of material a year (expandable to 70,000 tonnes) on John Cory Road at the Hume Resource Recovery Estate, is now going through a two-stage procurement process that started in early 2025, with an operational date pencilled in for 2026 (ACT Government, Built for CBR, FOGO Facility project page, 2025). Until that facility exists, food waste from the vast majority of Canberra households continues to go to landfill, where it decomposes anaerobically and produces methane — a far more potent greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide released when the same material is composted.
The strongest case
A genuinely well-designed scheme, and a target set higher than almost anywhere else
The fairest reading of this record starts with real achievements. The container-deposit scheme works. In its first five years the ACT's own statutory review found the container redemption rate had climbed from 35% before the scheme to around 70% by 2022-23, more than 473 million containers had been returned, litter had measurably fallen, and $130,000 had flowed to community groups through the scheme's charitable donation points (ACT Government, Five-Year Review of the ACT Container Deposit Scheme, 2023). That is a program doing what it was designed to do, delivered on time and broadly welcomed by the public. The 90%-by-2025 diversion target itself, whatever the ACT's shortfall against it, was also genuinely ambitious by national standards — well above what most Australian states have ever formally committed to — and the territory's Circular Economy Strategy, adopted in 2022-23, is one of the more comprehensive attempts in the country to move beyond "recycle more" toward "generate less" in the first place. The ACT is also a small jurisdiction of under half a million people trying to fund and build a full suite of waste infrastructure — a materials recovery facility, a landfill, and now a composting plant — on a revenue base a fraction of the size of a large state's, without the economies of scale bigger jurisdictions can draw on. Setting a genuinely stretching target, and building real infrastructure to chase it, is worth crediting even where the finish line keeps moving.
The evidence
The territory's own data shows a program that improved quickly in its early years and then plateaued. Federal reporting places the ACT's resource recovery rate at 73% in 2022-23 — a reasonable result by national comparison, but a decade of broadly flat performance against a target of 90% that was due to be reached by 2025 (National Waste and Resource Recovery Report 2024, DCCEEW, 2022-23 data). At the household level, the picture is patchier again: a NoWaste kerbside audit of single-unit dwellings found 9.4% of the material Canberrans put in their general (red) waste bin should have gone in the yellow recycling bin, and estimated that correct sorting alone could lift diversion from that stream from roughly 24% to 33% — a substantial gap between what the system is capable of and what households are actually doing with it (ACT NoWaste, kerbside waste audit, City Services).
The recycling system's physical fragility became public in the worst possible way at the end of 2022. On 26 December 2022, the ACT's only materials recovery facility, at Hume, was severely damaged by a fire that an official investigation later attributed to thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries that had been wrongly placed in household recycling (ACT Government, Investigation Released into Fire at Hume Recycling Facility, April 2023). WorkSafe ACT subsequently shut the site down over further fire hazards. With Canberra's own recycling capacity gone, the government spent weeks trucking the territory's yellow-bin material to three facilities in western Sydney and one in Victoria — roughly 229 tonnes a day, on about nine trucks (approx.), before the backlog was eventually cleared, with around 6,550 tonnes of stockpiled material ultimately recovered and only about 60 tonnes lost to landfill as unrecoverable spoil (ACT Government, City Services incident reporting, 2023). A $21 million federally co-funded upgrade to the same Hume facility, announced in July 2020 under the national Recycling Modernisation Fund and intended to add optical sorting and glass-washing capacity, was still being delivered when the fire hit — a reminder that the plant Canberra depends on for almost all of its household recycling has, for years, been simultaneously under repair and at risk.
A city that prices litter at ten cents a bottle still has no functioning replacement for the soft-plastics bin that collapsed under it in 2022.
The critique
Judged against its own numbers, the government's flagship target has not been met, and the record does not show it is about to be. The ACT Waste Management Strategy 2011–2025 set 90% resource recovery as the benchmark for this year; the most recent nationally reported figure has the territory at roughly 73%, a rate that has moved only modestly across the past decade (National Waste and Resource Recovery Report 2024, DCCEEW). That is not a target missed by a rounding error; it is a 17-percentage-point gap on a headline commitment the government set for itself, in a strategy it wrote, over a timeframe of its own choosing. A new strategy and a Circular Economy Act have since been layered on top, but neither retires the unmet 2025 target — it is simply allowed to lapse quietly rather than being formally acknowledged as missed.
The FOGO delay compounds the problem rather than sitting apart from it, because unrecovered food waste is not a neutral gap — it actively works against the territory's own climate commitments. Organic waste decomposing in landfill accounts for close to one-tenth of the ACT's total greenhouse emissions, and every tonne landfilled before the composting facility opens keeps generating methane for roughly two decades afterward (ACT Greens, media release citing government evidence to Estimates, 19 July 2023). A service promised for 2023 that will not exist before 2026 means Canberra will keep adding to that emissions load through a period in which the government has separately legislated a net-zero target. The Hume fire, meanwhile, exposed how thin the territory's operational margin really is: a single-point-of-failure facility, serving not just the ACT but five regional NSW councils as well, with no backup capacity in the territory at all when it went down. And the ACT remains, with the Northern Territory, one of only two Australian jurisdictions without a declared landfill levy; a "waste to landfill fee" is folded into the Mugga Lane gate charge, but its value is not made public, which makes it harder for residents or the Assembly to judge whether landfill disposal is being priced to discourage it as firmly as every other state has chosen to (industry reporting, Inside Waste). On soft plastics, the picture is a national failure the ACT has not fixed locally: when the REDcycle scheme collapsed in November 2022 after it emerged the company had been stockpiling more than 12,000 tonnes of collected plastic rather than recycling it, Canberra's Coles and Woolworths collection points closed along with every other state's, and no comparable territory-run alternative has replaced them since (ACCC, media statements on soft-plastics cooperation, 2022-23). Set against that, the container scheme's own regulator numbers show real friction too: the current 12-month redemption rate sits at 69%, meaning close to a third of eligible containers supplied into the ACT are still not being returned for their refund at all (actcds.org.au, scheme performance data, 2025-26).
The risk to the future
A single recycling plant, a still-unbuilt composter, and a target that keeps slipping
Canberra's waste system currently depends on one materials recovery facility that has already burned down once, and on a food-organics facility that is still being procured three years after households were promised it. If either slips again — through further fire risk from batteries that keep ending up in the wrong bin, through procurement delay, or through the population growth the ACT is separately banking on to fund its budget — landfill volumes and emissions rise by default, not by decision. A resource-recovery rate that has sat near 73% for a decade, against a 90% target the government set itself, is not a trajectory that closes the gap on its own; it requires the FOGO facility to open on schedule, the Hume plant's resilience to be genuinely fixed rather than patched, and a soft-plastics alternative to actually exist. Until all three are true, the next decade of Canberra's waste strategy will be measured against a target the last one already missed.