Two recent waste audit initiatives led by UNSW CSDR, in Fiji and Sri Lanka, demonstrate what becomes possible when an evidence base is developed for waste.
Packed into standard shipping containers placed end-to-end, the municipal solid waste generated globally in a single year would wrap around the Earth 25 times (UNEP, 2024). That figure commands attention, but what renders it truly alarming is how little is known, in most countries, about what those waste streams actually contain. Without systematic, site-specific data on waste composition, origin, and disposal pathways, even well-resourced waste management strategies risk being built on interpolation rather than evidence.
On this year’s International Day of Zero Waste, as global attention turns to food systems - what is produced, what is wasted, and how circular approaches can recover value at every stage - it is worth posing a more foundational question: do governments and local councils possess the empirical data necessary to make informed decisions about waste management planning?
Without urgent action, municipal solid waste generation is projected to reach 3.8 billion tons annually by 2050 (UNEP, 2024). Bridging the gap between current trajectories and sustainable outcomes demands not only political commitment, but robust, locally grounded data. Waste audits are among the most direct means of generating that data.
In many countries, national waste statistics remain incomplete and methodologically inconsistent. Where weighbridge infrastructure exists, tonnage estimates are derived from recorded measurements; where it does not, figures rely on volume-based approximations or vehicle count extrapolations that introduce considerable uncertainty. But even where total tonnage figures are available, they tell only part of the story. Knowing how much waste is generated says little about what that waste is made of and without a detailed breakdown of waste composition by material type, origin, and disposal pathway, a critical chain of decisions becomes impossible to make with confidence.
Planners cannot determine what proportion of waste is organic, plastic, paper, metal, or hazardous - meaning investments in treatment infrastructure such as Material Recovery Facilities risk being sized for the wrong material streams entirely. Recycling targets cannot be set or tracked, because the recyclable fraction of the waste stream is unknown. Beyond recycling, leakage pathways to waterways and the ocean cannot be identified or prioritised without understanding which materials are present, at which sites, and in what quantities.
The result is a data landscape in which planning decisions are made not from verified baselines, but from estimates compounded by assumptions, often adapted from regional averages that bear limited correspondence to local waste streams. Waste audits are the most direct means of breaking this cycle: generating empirical, site-specific data on waste composition that can anchor planning, policy, and investment in evidence rather than extrapolation.
A waste audit addresses these gaps by physically sorting, categorising, and weighing waste streams at defined sites - households, industries, landfills, open dumpsites, transfer stations, or communal collection points - to produce a verified baseline of what materials are present, in what quantities, and with what recovery potential.
Data collected during waste audits can provide an empirical foundation for planning material recovery infrastructure and designing Extended Producer Responsibility frameworks. They also provide the data foundation for calibrating container deposit schemes and constructing credible national greenhouse gas inventories for the waste sector under the Paris Agreement’s enhanced transparency framework.
Two recent initiatives led by UNSW CSDR, in Fiji and Sri Lanka, demonstrate what becomes possible when this evidence base is deliberately and systematically developed.
Fiji has shown global leadership in addressing the triple planetary crisis and leading efforts in the global agreement to end plastic pollution. Fiji has established ambitious policy frameworks on plastics and waste, including in their National Develop Plan 2025-2029 which aims to recover resources from wastes, plastics, chemicals and pollution to protect the environment from degradation and in their upcoming National Integrated Waste Management and Pollution Control Strategy 2025-2035 which aims for a zero-waste society focusing on waste minimisation, infrastructure improvement and strengthening environmental regulations.
Translating these ambitions into action requires a foundation of reliable data. Without a clear picture of how much plastic waste is generated, where it comes from and how it moves through the system, even the most well-design policies risk missing their mark. This is where targeted data collection and waste audits become essential.
The UNSW Centre for Sustainable Development Reform (CSDR) is supporting the Fiji Government, led by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, to develop Fiji's National Plastics Data Inventory - a nationally owned and governed resource serving as Fiji's central data source for plastics. Data sovereignty is a foundational principle underpinning this approach. For Small Island Developing States, the ability to generate, own, and govern national data is integral to effective policymaking and self-determined development. A nationally anchored inventory ensures that evidence informing Fiji's plastics governance - including in international negotiations and financing processes - reflects Fijian priorities and remains accountable to Fijian institutions. While the Inventory has established an important foundation for national plastics governance, its development also made clear that tracing how plastics enter, move through, and accumulate within Fiji’s waste system requires more than secondary data compilation. Understanding plastic flows across the lifecycle demands empirical composition data gathered at the points where those flows converge: the disposal sites, dumpsites, and communal collection points that receive the country’s waste.
To support delivery on this ambition and fill key data gaps, UNSW CSDR collaborated with the Pacific Recycling Foundation (PRF) to conduct waste audits across six sites in February 2026. The audits covered mainland open dumpsites at Vunato (Lautoka), Maururu (Ba), and Sigatoka, as well as communal dumpsites at Yanua Island, Solevu Village (Malolo), and Tavua Village on Fiji's outer islands. Two further audits are planned - at Naboro Landfill, to characterise the composition and volume of waste reaching Fiji's main disposal facility, and at two main inter-island ferry sites, to capture the flows of products and waste between the main island and outer islands.
The audits revealed that:
At mainland sites, substantial volumes of recoverable materials were found, including PET and HDPE bottles, films, rigid packaging, glass, and textiles. With appropriate collection and sorting infrastructure, these materials could be recovered and diverted from landfill.
On the outer islands, the picture was structurally different: goods are transported into communities, but no return pathway exists, leaving open burning as the prevailing disposal method.
These on-the-ground findings will now be used to enhance the baseline data in Fiji's national plastics data inventory, replacing estimated figures with field-verified composition data. Beyond the inventory, the evidence has direct policy applications: informing the design of container deposit return schemes, guiding infrastructure planning decisions, and supporting a more coherent national approach to waste management across both the mainland and outer island contexts.
These waste audits establish a baseline and a starting point of waste collection data. As Fiji’s National Plastics Data Inventory matures, repeat audits conducted at the same sites over time will allow policymakers to track whether interventions are working and where waste streams are shifting. Baseline data only becomes powerful when its updated overtime.
Fiji has ambitious targets, but until now, limited empirical evidence on which to base the design of specific interventions, where these audits begin to close the gap. The composition waste audit data can directly inform feasibility assessment for container deposit return schemes by identifying which materials exist in sufficient volumes to make recovery economically viable. The findings can also shed light on gaps in Fiji’s waste system particularly in the remote island communities, where the data can support designing solutions. More broadly, grounding national policy in place-specific, verified data moves Fiji from aspirational targets towards evidence-based waste governance.
Photos from the waste audits in March 2026 completed by Pacific Recycling Foundation (PRF) in Fiji.
Photos from the waste audits in March 2026 completed by Pacific Recycling Foundation (PRF) in Fiji.
Photos from the waste audits in March 2026 completed by Pacific Recycling Foundation (PRF) in Fiji.
In Sri Lanka, the National Solid Waste Management Support Centre (NSWMSC) under the Ministry of Public Administration, Provincial Councils and Local Government, is implementing a national programme to establish 58 Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) across the country. The planning of such infrastructure raises a prior question that is often overlooked: what will these facilities actually process, and in what volumes?
MRF facilities should be site-specific, which requires a baseline understanding of the types of quantities of materials likely to be recovered in an area. To gather this evidence-based, CSDR partnered with NSWMSC, GIZ Sri Lanka, and the Centre for Planetary Health at the University of Colombo to deliver waste audit training to local council officers responsible for the 20 MRFs prioritised in the first phase of the programme. Training workshops were conducted across three provinces, with more than 100 officers participating.
The workshops addressed three interconnected questions central to MRF planning:
What materials are present at local disposal sites and in sufficient quantities to justify diversion?
How does value addition - through sorting, cleaning, and baling - affect the prices that recyclables can command in secondary markets?
How should MRF scale and design be calibrated to reflect actual local waste composition rather than generic templates?
An MRF specified without this baseline risks misalignment between infrastructure capacity and the material streams it is designed to process.
Beyond immediate planning applications, the training builds lasting institutional capacity. By equipping council officers with the skills to conduct ongoing audits, it reduces dependence on periodic externally commissioned studies and enables local governments to generate and update their own evidence base as waste streams evolve over time.
Participants during the National Waste audit training workshop in Sri Lanka, March 2026.
Presentation slides for the National Waste audit training workshop in Sri Lanka, March 2026.
Participants during the National Waste audit training workshop in Sri Lanka, March 2026.
Participants during the National Waste audit training workshop in Sri Lanka, March 2026.
Participants during the National Waste audit training workshop in Sri Lanka, March 2026.
The policy and planning benefits of waste audits extend well beyond individual project contexts. At the facility level, audits identify divertable fractions, inform infrastructure specification, and render the economics of material recovery legible to potential investors. At the national level, they underpin the waste sector components of greenhouse gas inventories and Biennial Transparency Reports - a function of growing importance as countries are held to account under the Paris Agreement's enhanced transparency framework. Across both scales, they provide the empirical foundation for designing EPR frameworks, container deposit schemes, and source separation programmes that are responsive to verified local conditions rather than assumed ones.
Increasing resource use has been identified as the primary driver of the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution. Addressing this crisis requires structural transitions across production and consumption systems. However, those transitions must be planned and planning requires data. Waste audits will not independently resolve the global waste challenge. What they provide is something that no policy intervention can succeed without: an accurate account of what is actually there.