The Environment Ministers Meeting has put renewed focus on product stewardship. Brooke Donnelly considers why it matters to Australia’s economic resilience – and what government and industry must do to turn intent into practical outcomes.
Australia is approaching a turning point in how it manages products, materials and resources. What was once considered primarily an environmental challenge has become a supply-chain, economic and community issue.
Product stewardship provides a practical framework through which responsibility can be shared, lost material value recovered and more resilient supply chains built. For many businesses, it is also becoming a mechanism for addressing climate, resource and circular economy risks while strengthening long-term supply-chain performance.
Earlier this month, I wrote that while many in the packaging sector would be disappointed by the Federal Government’s decision not to introduce a new national packaging scheme during its current term, this should not be seen as a pause in progress. Instead, it presents an opportunity for industry and government to work together on practical solutions that can deliver measurable outcomes and help shape the future of packaging reform.
The outcome of the recent Meeting of Environment Ministers brought this question back into focus.
The meeting did not give the packaging sector the certainty it has been seeking. There is still no timetable for a new national packaging scheme, and no date has been set for ministers to consider the next steps.
The communiqué issued after the meeting did, however, place renewed emphasis on product stewardship. It identified batteries, solar panels and soft plastics as priority areas requiring nationally coordinated responses.
Each presents a different technical challenge, but they share an underlying problem: products are placed on the market without sufficiently robust systems to manage their materials at end of life. The costs, risks and responsibilities are distributed across multiple sectors, often without the coordination needed to recover their value.
Every year, valuable materials leave the Australian economy because the systems required to collect, process and return them to productive use remain fragmented. The result is not only environmental loss, but economic loss, greater supply-chain vulnerability and missed investment opportunities.
For too long, packaging reform has been framed as a choice between voluntary action and regulation. Yet successful environmental reform generally depends on both: industry developing workable solutions and governments providing the policy framework, accountability and regulatory certainty needed to expand them.
The ministers agreed to continue examining options with industry, local government and other stakeholders. The communiqué also refers to strengthening existing co-regulatory arrangements, progressing a future packaging reform plan and developing Australia’s circular economy framework.
These commitments do not settle how or when packaging reform will proceed. They do, however, indicate that the pathway is likely to involve a combination of public policy, regulatory coordination and industry-developed solutions.
Stewardship in practice
Product stewardship recognises that organisations placing products and packaging onto the market have a role in managing what happens at end of life. It provides a collaborative framework for funding, governance, performance measurement and continuous improvement across the supply chain.
During my time as CEO of APCO, the Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) demonstrated the power of stewardship built around shared objectives. Brand owners, retailers, packaging manufacturers, recyclers and government aligned behind a common goal: helping Australians recycle packaging correctly through clear, consistent information That collective commitment supported widespread adoption of the ARL, which now appears on more than 500,000 products across Australia and New Zealand.
Product stewardship should no longer be viewed only as an environmental obligation or compliance mechanism. Well-designed stewardship systems can secure access to materials, recover value that would otherwise be lost, reduce supply-chain risk, attract investment in recovery infrastructure and help create markets for secondary resources.
Effective stewardship requires clearly allocated responsibility, broad and equitable participation, transparent governance, reliable funding, measurable targets and credible reporting. It must also connect collection and recovery with genuine end markets so that recovered resources retain economic value.
Australia’s challenge is to demonstrate what good stewardship looks like in practice.
In my role as General Manager Sustainability at Coles Group, I saw industry respond to the significant challenges created by the REDcycle stockpile. Meaningful progress depended on competitors, supply-chain partners, governments and recovery organisations working together to understand the risks, share responsibility and develop practical solutions. The experience reinforced a fundamental principle of stewardship: when responsibility is distributed across a value chain, solutions must also be collaborative.
Soft plastics as a test case
Soft Plastics Stewardship Australia (SPSA) is developing a coordinated model for a difficult material stream. As a former SPSA director representing Coles Group, one of its founding organisations, I was directly involved in supporting the development of a model intended to share responsibility for soft plastics recovery across industry. SPSA is designed around core product stewardship principles, bringing together participants from different parts of the value chain to support shared funding, collective governance, performance oversight and coordinated action.
Its recognition in the communiqué suggests that credible industry-led initiatives may help inform future national approaches. However, the value of any stewardship model will ultimately be determined by the breadth of participation it achieves, the transparency of its operations and its ability to connect collection with processing capacity and viable end markets.
This offers a broader lesson for packaging reform.
The next stage of the Extended Producer Responsibility conversation must move beyond support in principle to implementation in practice. Industry can help demonstrate the strategies needed to make EPR effective, identify what works and show where government intervention is required.
Government, in turn, can provide the policy architecture that aligns incentives, establishes accountability and enables investment. Clear direction, consistent frameworks and long-term certainty will give businesses greater confidence to invest in collection, recovery and reprocessing.
Neither side can deliver the transition independently.
The ministers’ communiqué provides a basis for further work, but the next steps will be what matter. Industry must continue developing practical, transparent and commercially viable stewardship models. Governments must establish the participation and accountability requirements that allow effective models to operate equitably and at scale.
The opportunity now is to turn product stewardship from an expression of intent into systems that recover material value, address shared risks and strengthen Australia’s supply chains.
