On behalf of Mr Jihad Dib: I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

The New South Wales Government is pleased to introduce the Environmental Legislation Amendment (Plastic Reduction and Container Recycling) Bill 2026. As the Government has emphasised many times, New South Wales is facing a waste crisis. Growing waste generation and stagnating recycling rates mean that more of our waste is being sent to landfill year on year. These trends cannot be sustained. Greater Sydney is on track to run out of landfill space by 2030. Without intervention, this will result in increased costs to ratepayers for essential waste services, disruptions to the delivery of critical infrastructure projects, and risks of greater illegal dumping and waste stockpiling. The New South Wales Government is taking action to make sure there is enough waste infrastructure capacity available in the immediate term for the people of New South Wales to continue to have their red-lid kerbside bins collected.

But the best way to stop us from running up against this issue again and again is to keep more material out of landfill and in use for longer by making the transition to a safe, circular economy in New South Wales. This is a top priority for the New South Wales Government, but plastic waste presents one of the biggest challenges to this goal. In November 2025 the New South Wales Government released the NSW Plastics Plan 2.0. The plan sets out 27 finalised actions to reduce plastic waste generation and increase re-use and recycling, ensuring that plastic items are not littered or landfilled. The New South Wales Government presents this bill as the first stage in progressing these actions, targeting some of the most harmful and highly littered plastic items in our environment. The bill also makes changes to support the New South Wales container deposit scheme, Return and Earn—one of the best litter reduction and recycling tools available to us—as well as making other minor amendments to strengthen environmental legislation.

Plastic items are low cost, convenient and embedded in many parts of our day-to-day life. In many respects, this is a good thing. Plastic is an important component in a lot of our modern technology. It is used in life-saving medical supplies and can protect food safety and prolong the shelf life of groceries to reduce food waste. But many plastic items are designed for disposal and are used only once or a limited number of times. Single-use plastic items have become so widespread largely because they are cheap. But their price does not reflect the true cost of their impact on the environment, on wildlife, on our waste management systems and on our health. These costs are too numerous and too great to ignore. Resources are extracted and manufactured into plastic items through carbon-intensive processes before they are transported, often across oceans, and sold on, just to be used once or twice and then thrown away in landfill or littered.

In the 2023-24 financial year only 15.6 per cent of the nearly 935,800 tonnes of plastic waste generated in New South Wales was recycled, meaning nearly 800,000 tonnes were sent to landfill. This figure does not include the volumes of plastic waste that end up in our environment as litter. About 74 per cent of the littered items in our waterways are made of plastic. We know that plastic litter in the environment can have disastrous consequences for our wildlife. Animals can be harmed or killed when they eat plastic waste or become tangled in it, and our marine wildlife is particularly vulnerable. Globally, it is estimated that at least eight million tonnes of plastic end up in the ocean each year. In New South Wales, for each piece of litter found on land, nearly nine more can be found in our waterways. Nearly half of all seabird species and half of all sea turtles in the world are likely to have ingested plastic debris, and a turtle has a 22 per cent chance of dying if it eats just one piece of plastic.

Plastic litter also comes at significant cost. Local councils, land managers and community groups spend around $167 million to $198 million a year cleaning up litter, most of which is borne by ratepayers. When we add to this the indirect costs associated with the loss of amenity and environmental values, it is estimated that litter costs New South Wales more than $500 million each year. Plastic items can persist for centuries in landfill or in the environment, though their useful life might have only lasted for a few minutes. And they do not stay intact. Over time, exposed to the elements, they can fragment into smaller and smaller pieces, known as microplastics and nanoplastics. We have only recently begun to understand the risks these plastic fragments may pose to the environment and to our health, and further research is needed.

What we do know is that microplastics are everywhere. They are in our oceans, the seafood that we eat, the soil that grows our produce, the air that we breathe and the water that we drink. They also leach chemicals that are added during plastics manufacturing to change the way an item looks and functions. Some of these chemicals are beneficial and safe for use. Others can persist in the environment, accumulate in the body and impact human health by disrupting hormone function, damaging the nervous system or causing cancer. Microplastics and the chemicals in plastics also pose significant challenges to recycling. They can contaminate new products made from recycled plastics. When plastic items are improperly disposed of in green-lid kerbside bins, they can also contaminate compost made from organic waste, preventing the safe use of this valuable, recovered resource in household gardens, public parks and playgrounds, and agricultural land. We have already made good progress in addressing the challenges posed by plastic waste.

I commend the former Government for recognising these challenges and introducing the Plastic Reduction and Circular Economy Act 2021, or the PRCE Act. The PRCE Act sets a framework to prohibit problematic or unnecessary plastic items and sets design standards to improve the way they are made. Under the PRCE Act, important steps were taken to ban lightweight plastic shopping bags, rinse-off personal care products containing plastic microbeads, and single-use plastic items including straws, stirrers, cutlery, plates, unlidded bowls, cotton buds and expanded polystyrene food ware and cups. Last year these bans and other litter prevention initiatives, such as Return and Earn, allowed New South Wales to meet and exceed our 30 per cent plastic litter reduction target, reducing plastic litter in the environment by 45 per cent compared to 2019 levels. This is the equivalent of 2,000 buses filled to the brim with plastic rubbish. But plastic items remain the least recycled and most littered material in the State, and producers must begin to consider end-of-life impacts when they design and manufacture their products.

We are fighting a losing battle against an ocean of plastic waste if we do not take further steps to change the way plastics are made and used so that more of what we consume is re-used and recycled, not littered or landfilled. That is why the New South Wales Government released the NSW Plastics Plan 2.0 in November 2025. The actions in the plan aim to further reduce plastic litter in the environment, in pursuit of our next target to reduce all littered items by 60 per cent by 2030. They include reducing microplastics and harmful chemical additives in the environment and in recycling streams. They are designed to bring us into line with other Australian States and Territories where we have lagged and take us further where the risks posed by plastic waste are too great to wait for others to act. The actions in the NSW Plastics Plan 2.0 were informed by an extensive, multi‑stage consultation process that was led by the NSW Environment Protection Authority [EPA] and included two rounds of public consultation and multiple workshops with environment groups, government bodies and representatives across the plastics and packaging supply chain.

During that process, the EPA received nearly 7½ thousand survey responses and written submissions on an issues paper and draft action plan that were released in October 2023 and November 2024, respectively. Those submissions came from members of the community, small and large businesses, local councils, environment organisations, and the waste and resource recovery sector. The demand for action on plastic waste was clear. During consultation on the NSW Plastics: Next Steps issues paper, 97 per cent of survey respondents supported New South Wales taking further action on plastics. When seeking feedback on the NSW Plastics: The Way Forward draft action plan, 90 per cent of individuals and 80 per cent of organisations that responded to the survey agreed with the proposed actions. In their submissions, businesses emphasised the need for appropriate transition times for new phase-outs, design standards and other requirements so that they can exhaust their existing stock and adjust their operations with minimal disruption.

Reflecting that feedback, the implementation of the 27 actions in the NSW Plastics Plan 2.0 will be staged between now and 2030. This bill is the first stage of that implementation process. It will give effect to several of the actions in the NSW Plastics Plan 2.0 by (a) amending the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997 to expand an existing ban on the release of 20 or more lighter-than-air, or helium, balloons into the open air to apply to any number of balloons; and (b) amending the Plastic Reduction and Circular Economy Act 2021 to require takeaway food service businesses to accept and offer re-usable cup alternatives to single-use cups, with appropriate safeguards. The bill also paves the way for the implementation of other actions in the NSW Plastics Plan 2.0, including by amending regulation-making powers in the Plastic Reduction and Circular Economy Act 2021.

I now turn to the detail of the bill. I will first speak to the introduction of new requirements under the Plastic Reduction and Circular Economy Act 2021 that are intended to increase the uptake of re-usable alternatives to single-use cups. In 2023-24 over 800 million single-use plastic cups, including plastic-lined coffee cups, were consumed across the State. Most of those items were then landfilled, if not littered. Takeaway food and beverage items, including single-use plastic cups, account for 24 per cent of littered items in our urban estuaries, making up the largest category of littered items in our waterways. Re-usable alternatives to single-use plastic cups can help to reduce littering by ensuring that people continue to value items long after they are first used rather than throwing them away.

While re-usable alternatives to single-use cups are available, they are not currently being used at the scale needed to actually make a difference. To make it easier for people to use re-usable cups as part of their day-to‑day life, the bill introduces a new requirement for takeaway businesses to accept a re-usable cup provided by a customer for a beverage that would otherwise be served in a single-use cup. Under this requirement, businesses must not charge customers extra for supplying the beverage in the customer's re-usable cup. To protect food health and safety, the New South Wales Government intends to provide exemptions from this requirement that will allow a business to refuse a re‑usable cup if it does not meet certain suitability requirements, including if it is not clean, safe or fit for its intended use.

The New South Wales Government will also work with businesses to determine whether other exemptions may be appropriate, such as in stadiums or other entertainment venues to protect safety and security or in drive‑through settings. The requirement will commence on 1 January 2028 to allow businesses that do not currently accept re‑usable cups from their customers to adjust their operations. Failure to accept a re-usable cup provided by a customer will carry maximum penalties of $2,200 for an individual and $11,000 otherwise. The bill also introduces a requirement for takeaway businesses to offer a customer a re-usable cup for a takeaway beverage as part of a re-use scheme. A re-use scheme may include the logistics, infrastructure, operations and incentives that enable and encourage the use, return or collection and re-use of a re-usable cup.

Having an effective and efficient scheme in place is essential to ensuring a re-usable cup is used enough times in practice to achieve the environmental benefits it has the potential to deliver. The New South Wales Government will further define requirements for a re-use scheme and its re-usable cups in regulation and in consultation with businesses and the community to ensure that they are workable for businesses while achieving positive environmental outcomes. In doing so, we will consider ways to ensure that the re-usable cup is durable, that it is incentivised to be returned by customers or collected by businesses to be safely re-used, and that it can be recycled once it reaches its end of life. The bill will ensure that businesses do not charge customers more for a beverage served in a re-usable cup than what it would cost if it was provided in a single-use cup. That is to ensure consumers are not disincentivised from using a re-usable cup. The New South Wales Government will consider an exemption for scenarios where the fee is a deposit-refund to encourage the return of the re-usable cup or as an initial charge for a customer to purchase the cup for future re-use.

The New South Wales Government recognises that this action will come with up-front costs to businesses. To manage those costs, the New South Wales Government intends to exempt small businesses and will consider a staged approach to its implementation, starting with more controlled environments like stadiums, festivals or food courts where re-use systems may be more easily implemented. The requirement will not commence until December 2030, allowing enough time for in-scope businesses to prepare and adopt a re-use scheme that is suited to them. Failure to offer a re-usable cup to a customer as part of a re-use system will carry maximum penalties of $22,000 for an individual and $110,000 otherwise. These penalties are higher than for the requirement to accept a re-usable cup because an initial investment by a business to establish a re-use scheme is required, and a sufficient disincentive is needed to ensure that large operators do not factor noncompliance into the "cost of doing business".

I will now speak to the provisions of the bill that amend the regulation- and exemption-making powers of the Plastic Reduction and Circular Economy Act 2021. These support the new requirements introduced under the bill and enable the implementation of other actions under the NSW Plastics Plan 2.0. For example, a future action is to require highly littered single-use plastic items, including cups and food containers, to be designed for recycling and to have labels indicating how they should be properly re-used, recycled or disposed of. To ensure that any labelling or recyclability standards introduced via regulation are futureproofed and can be updated to reflect national and global best practice of the time, the bill provides for the ability to prescribe design standards for labelling and recyclability in an EPA order published on its website. To support this, the bill also: (a) broadens existing powers to grant exemptions under the Act and regulations, including to impose requirements about the certification, testing, assessment, accreditation or verification of items; (b) provides regulation‑making powers for a scheme for the purpose of certifying, testing, assessing or accrediting items; and (c) amends regulation‑making powers and existing exemption powers to permit requirements about the making, keeping and inspection of records or other information for purposes under the Act, the regulations, or an exemption.

The bill also includes new regulation‑making powers to grant exemptions from the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Act or regulations. These powers will support the expansion of the container deposit scheme by providing flexibility in how the existing scheme can adapt to the collection of new container types and sizes, and for other transitional matters. The bill amends the definition of supply in the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Act so regulations may prescribe a situation in which a supply is taken to be a "first supply" or not, including for contract bottlers. This implements a recommendation from the statutory review of the container deposit scheme to ensure that businesses that bottle "own brand" beverages on behalf of major retailers are not unintentionally captured as first suppliers under the container deposit scheme. This will also enhance harmonisation with other States and Territories.

The bill also amends regulation‑making powers in the Protection of the Environment Operations Act to support the remake of the Protection of the Environment Operations (Waste) Regulation 2014, which is a highly technical and complex regulation. Some of the provisions have been identified by the Parliamentary Counsel's Office as either Henry VIII provisions or as shell provisions. Those provisions are noted in the explanatory note to the bill. They have been included in the bill only because they are essential for the purposes I have outlined. Innovations in plastic and packaging are constant, as are advances in recycling technology, and these powers support the ability to quickly respond to those changes and to grant appropriate exemptions to reflect the policy intent and ensure that there are no unintended consequences. The core obligations, associated offences and penalties are maintained in the relevant Acts. Appropriate public consultation will occur on the principal regulation under the PRCE Act and the remake of the Protection of the Environment Operations (Waste) Regulation. As members know, a regulation is disallowable to maintain parliamentary oversight.

The bill also makes amendments to the Plastic Reduction and Circular Economy Act 2021 to enable the EPA to more effectively enforce the requirements of the Act, including the new requirements relating to re‑use. This includes amendments to require a supplier or operator of a takeaway business, or a person granted an exemption, to prepare and keep information prescribed by the regulations or as required under an exemption respectively, and to make that information available to an authorised officer on request. It also includes a provision for a person to give information or records to another person as required under the Act, regulations or an exemption. This may be particularly helpful in facilitating the sharing of information along the supply chain, especially by manufacturers who have the best knowledge about the items that they make and supply. Where retailers are unable to obtain information from wholesalers, distributors or manufacturers, these provisions could support retailers to obtain information so they can comply with the Act. The maximum penalties are commensurate with similar penalties in other legislation.

To support enforcement of the new re‑use requirements, the bill also amends existing compliance notice powers to provide that: (a) the EPA may issue a notice if it reasonably suspects that a takeaway business has contravened or is likely to contravene requirements relating to reusable cups; and (b) notices relating to reusable cups may require a person to make or keep information or records. The bill also makes amendments to existing false and misleading offences to: (a) account for reusable cups supplied by or to takeaway businesses that are required to comply with the requirement to offer a reusable cup as part of a re‑use scheme; and (b) clarify wording and ensure the offences can also apply to information relating to an exemption for an item.

I now speak to the amendments made by the bill to the definitions of "plastic" and "single use" in the Plastic Reduction and Circular Economy Act 2021. Currently, "plastic" includes materials made from organic polymers derived from plant extracts and fossil fuels but does not clearly cover organic polymers derived from animals or microorganisms. This means that certain bioplastics—for example, those synthesised using microorganisms or derived from the shells of crustaceans—fall outside the definition of plastic. This is counter to the policy intent of the Act in prohibiting certain single‑use plastic items to promote a circular economy. By expanding the definition of "plastic" in the Act, single‑use plastic items such as straws and cutlery made from such bioplastics can be captured under the Act as prohibited items.

The bill also amends the definition of "single‑use" to capture items that are designed or intended to be, or are ordinarily, used more than once but still only a limited number of times. This is a regulatory gap we need to fill as those items continue to pose a risk to compliance and litter‑reduction efforts. Expanding the definition of "single‑use" to account for such items aligns with the policy intent of the Act and will improve the enforceability of prohibitions on single‑use items. It is also in line with approaches taken in other Australian jurisdictions, as regulations in South Australia and Western Australia consider that a single‑use item may be one that is used more than a single time. The New South Wales Government will provide information and updated guidance to businesses regarding these changes so that they are aware of the amended definitions and how to comply.

I turn now to the provisions of the bill that deal with lighter‑than‑air balloon releases. Currently, section 146E of the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997 makes it an offence to release 20 or more balloons that are inflated with a gas that causes them to rise into the air, such as helium. In line with the NSW Plastics Plan 2.0, this bill expands that provision to apply to the release of one or more lighter‑than‑air balloons. Even a single balloon, when released, can rise into the air and travel long distances before ending up in our waterways and oceans. Once in those environments, marine wildlife can be entangled by or eat balloon debris. Turtles have been found to selectively eat burst balloons, mistaking them for jellyfish.

Balloons are a priority threat to our marine environment and are considered the deadliest type of marine debris for seabirds. Western Australia and Queensland have already banned the release of lighter‑than‑air balloons, while Victoria and Tasmania consider balloon releases to be a littering offence. This amendment will ensure that New South Wales keeps pace with other Australian States and Territories and reduces the risk of wildlife injury and death due to balloon litter in our environment. The amendment retains the existing penalties and exemptions under section 146E of the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997, including exemptions for one or more balloons that are released unintentionally and without negligence. Under the Plastics Plan 2.0, the New South Wales Government will take further action to ban plastic balloon sticks and ties via regulations.

One of our most effective levers for litter reduction in New South Wales is the Return and Earn container deposit scheme. The scheme was established in 2016 under part 5 of the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Act 2001. Since that time, over 80 per cent of adults in New South Wales have participated in the scheme to collect and return more than 15 billion containers, driving a 73 per cent reduction in the number of littered beverage containers that are eligible for the scheme. The scheme has also delivered significant recycling outcomes, with over 1.2 million tonnes of material collected through the scheme being recycled, doubling the recycling rate of used beverage containers.

The scheme is now eight years old, and we need to ensure that it is set up well for ongoing success into the future. The Minister for the Environment has a statutory obligation to review part 5 of the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Act 2001 to ensure its policy objectives remain valid and its terms remain appropriate in securing those objectives. The Environment Protection Authority [EPA], which is responsible for the oversight of the scheme, prepared the statutory review report which was tabled in Parliament in November 2025 and published on the EPA website. The statutory review found that part 5 of the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Act 2001 is working well but improvements can be made to enhance the operational experience and transparency for Return and Earn participants.

The bill proposes amendments to the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Act 2001 to give effect to the recommendations of the statutory review and make other minor improvements. These include improving offence provisions to better protect the container deposit scheme from fraudulent behaviour, extending to all suppliers the responsibility for ensuring containers have a barcode, and extending to all suppliers the responsibility to ensure metal containers with removeable opening mechanism that cannot be attached are not supplied, to further improve litter outcomes.

Finally, the bill makes minor and mechanical amendments to other legislation. This includes modernising disclosure of information provisions in various pieces of legislation, aligning them with other comparable disclosure of information provisions and to reflect best practice, and minor changes to reflect the policy intent of the Environmental Legislation Amendment Act 2025 regarding existing notice powers and ancillary directions amended or introduced by that Act. In conclusion, I take the opportunity to thank industry bodies such as the Australian Retail Council, environment groups such as Boomerang Alliance, and all the businesses and members of the community who provided input into the development of the New South Wales Plastics Plan 2.0. Their feedback has helped to shape this legislation and future actions under the plan. We will continue to work closely with key stakeholders and the community as we develop regulations.

The bill shows this Government's commitment to strengthening environmental legislation and protecting the environment as well as the people of New South Wales from our escalating waste crisis. This is only the first step in implementing the Plastics Plan 2.0. The Government will continue to take strong action to design out waste in the first instance, and increase re-use and recycling to keep materials out of landfill and in use for longer. We cannot wait any longer to act. We call on individuals, community groups, environment organisations, businesses and industry bodies to share our vision and join us in transitioning to a safe circular economy. I commend the bill to the House.