Rockhampton Regional Council is urging the Queensland government to subsidise transport costs after warning it cannot meet state-imposed recycling targets, with the annual bill for moving recyclables hundreds of kilometres south for processing proving increasingly unworkable.
A $3 Million Waste Bill — and Rising
Every year, roughly 10,000 tonnes of household recyclables collected across the Rockhampton region are trucked 600 kilometres to a facility on the Sunshine Coast for processing — a logistical burden that reflects the broader challenges of waste management in Australia for communities far from major urban centres.
Waste services cost the council approximately $3 million per year, with more than one-third of that figure attributable to transportation alone. Mayor Tony Williams said the cost disparity between regional and south-east Queensland councils was stark: Rockhampton pays around $300 per tonne to send recyclables for processing, compared to roughly $100 per tonne for councils closer to processing facilities.
"The cookie-cutter approach to increasing recycling really doesn't help when the tyrannies of distance and the cost to transport that material is ever-increasing," Mayor Williams said.
He added that without financial relief, the government's recycling ambitions would remain out of reach for the region. "With the state government wishing to increase recycling locally, there's no real benefit unless we get some subsidies towards those transport costs," he said.
Local Facility Lost, Replacements Elusive
The situation has been compounded by the 2020 destruction of Rockhampton's private materials recovery facility, which was gutted by a battery fire. That facility had previously handled recyclables locally, avoiding the lengthy haul south entirely.
Since then, the council has been unable to attract a private company to build a replacement. Without a local processing option, the council has no viable pathway to reduce its transport costs or meaningfully improve recycling rates in the near term.
Mayor Williams said council staff had assessed the situation and concluded that the targets set by the state were simply not achievable under current conditions. "We've done our waste plans and our staff are saying that we can't achieve the targets that the state government is putting onto councils," he said.
Queensland's 2035 Recycling Targets Under Pressure
The Queensland government released its waste strategy in June, setting an overall recycling target of 65 per cent by 2035. Major regional communities, including Rockhampton, are expected to halve the volume of waste they send to landfill as part of that strategy.
In response to the council's concerns, the state's environment minister said the government was providing $11 million in new funding for recycling infrastructure in regional areas. A new fund is also being designed specifically to help regional councils cover the cost of sending recyclables for processing — though details of that fund have not yet been finalised.
Industry Calls for National Action
The head of the Australian Council of Recycling described the situation facing regional councils as a direct consequence of stalled national reform. She argued that the federal government should not have shelved national packaging reforms, which she said would have distributed the financial burden more fairly across the supply chain and placed greater responsibility on producers.
"It's extraordinarily disappointing to see that lack of progress in packaging reform," she said. "We should have had regulatory certainty about the fact that burden would be shared much better across the supply chain and much more responsibility would be placed on producers."
The federal environment minister indicated the government's focus remained on working with states and territories, though no specific commitment to reinstating packaging reform was outlined. For Rockhampton, the pressure to act is immediate — and the council says it cannot wait for a national solution to catch up with its escalating costs.
