The communities of remote northern Australia face significant challenges in waste management. Conventional challenges include low public or private investment in waste management, high transport costs, intermittent seasonal access, and a wet-dry climate that makes infrastructure maintenance and scaling-up waste and debris management to cover vast areas of un-serviced land and coastlines particularly challenging. Many coastal communities, particularly those in the Gulf of Carpentaria also have the additional burden of a large volume of rubbish from external sources such as shipping and foreign fishing washing up on remote beaches.
This project will review the current status of waste management in remote communities of northern Australia, and seek examples of best practice models nationally and internationally to improve waste disposal and management. The project will then work with two remote northern Australian communities in a collaborative on-ground case study.
Remote communities on Cape York Peninsula face heavy loads of marine debris such as ghost nets that wash up on north Queensland beaches. The remoteness of these communities makes it a challenge to deal with this waste and debris which mostly comes from other places.
Christy Davies (Project Leader, NAILSMA)