On behalf of Mr Jihad Dib: I move:
That this bill be now read a second time.
The Government is pleased to introduce the Product Lifecycle Responsibility Bill 2025. The bill proposes a new Act to establish a product stewardship framework for brand owners of certain products, the Product Lifecycle Responsibility Act. The Act will create a framework for regulating product stewardship for any product and is futureproofed to handle emerging environmental issues. The framework established under the bill allows the Minister to prescribe, by regulation, requirements across the entire life cycle of a product, including the development, design, creation, production, assembly, supply, use or re-use, collection, recovery, recycling or disposal of the regulated product. This legislation is intended in the first instance to be used to provide a framework for the regulation of product stewardship for batteries.
The fact is that while batteries are an incredibly important part of society and will help us decarbonise our economy, they pose a risk to people when not properly disposed of, when damaged, when mishandled or when improperly designed. This bill would enable the New South Wales Government to take comprehensive action and escalate its response to reduce the likelihood and prevalence of battery fires in the waste supply chain and prevent further deaths, injuries and property damage. We have been prompted to action by the lithium ion battery fire crisis in New South Wales. According to Fire and Rescue NSW, these batteries are the fastest growing fire risk in New South Wales, with 324 incidents since 2024, including 33 injuries and 1,125 evacuations. This is up from 171 incidents in 2022.
Battery fires are an escalating risk in New South Wales, driven by the growing number of lithium ion batteries throughout the community. While these batteries have significant benefits, the risk of fires from unsafe or mishandled lithium ion batteries is growing. This bill provides us with a system to be able to easily and quickly regulate products causing problems, whether that is a risk to safety or a risk to our environment. Whilst these laws will work alongside Commonwealth laws, this is nation-leading reform. New South Wales will lead the way for new mandatory product life cycle schemes that we hope other States will adopt.
Batteries are an example of how, too often, products are designed without any consideration of what will happen to them when their use has ended. This must change. That is not to say that there are no responsible product producers; there are, and we celebrate those businesses. This legislation is targeted at companies that are producing products with limited thought to the end state—poor-quality products that are too often focused on planned obsolescence. This is not a good outcome for our society or our environment. Products and materials should remain in circulation for as long as is safely possible. This legislation also provides the legislative framework to ensure there is regulatory oversight of product stewardship organisations when dealing with products that can cause harm. This is to ensure that product stewardship organisations are fulfilling their agreed responsibilities and measures can be taken where they are not. This legislation allows the Government to enter into a contract with a product stewardship organisation.
The bill carries significant penalties for brand owners—the owner of a product name—who fail to comply with product stewardship requirements set by the regulations and, in particular, for contraventions of safety requirements identified by the regulations. Research from the waste and recycling industry in 2024 estimated that the waste and resource recovery sector deals with between 10,000 and 12,000 fires a year in trucks and at facilities caused by improperly disposed of lithium ion batteries. When batteries are placed in kerbside red bins or commercial bins, they end up in waste trucks and can make their way to landfills or resource recovery facilities. This causes problems because they can ignite when punctured in the back of a truck or in recycling processing machinery.
When lithium ion batteries are damaged, they can enter a process called thermal runaway. They create very hot fires that are extremely difficult to extinguish and release toxic gases into the air. Ironically, we saw this the day after this bill was introduced in the other place. On 19 March in Maitland, Fire and Rescue NSW responded to a fire in a townhouse. The cause of the fire is still being investigated. However, Fire and Rescue NSW stated that the intensity of the fire and the difficulty putting it out was contributed to by several lithium ion batteries that had gone into thermal runaway.
When an emergency responder, truck driver or facility worker is exposed to a battery fire, they risk serious safety and health consequences. They can experience burns, exposure to hazardous chemicals on their skin and harm from breathing in vapours from the burning battery. The hazardous chemicals in lithium ion batteries can also leak into landfills as they are compacted and exposed to moisture over time. There is a risk that the liquid could breach the landfill lining, leach into surrounding waterways and travel in the groundwater to other sites. These events can have serious water pollution and human health impacts. This is why the New South Wales Government must take urgent action now to address these significant challenges.
Battery fires are a problem across Australia. The environment Ministers meeting in December 2024 identified the need for urgent reforms to product stewardship arrangements for batteries to address the escalating risks of battery fires and create a safe circular economy. Ministers recognised the need to act quickly to reduce the risks of battery fires, with the New South Wales Government committing to progressing this legislation. We will not stand by idly and watch this crisis. The existing voluntary schemes are inadequate for the challenges we face. New South Wales is leading the way nationally, because we must, providing a comprehensive regulatory framework with appropriate oversight to protect the environment and human health. This approach is an escalation from the voluntary approach employed under existing Commonwealth accreditation, which does not have the same regulatory oversights or mandatory obligations.
New South Wales is initially taking a twofold approach to regulation. The first component of the Government's response is this bill. The bill will allow the Government to establish product stewardship schemes and cover potentially harmful products. This legislation has been drafted as a standalone Act so that it can easily be used by other States and Territories as a template to regulate product stewardship. We hope that other Australian States and Territories will adopt this legislation to harmonise the approach. During development of the bill we consulted with other jurisdictions to understand their challenges. Standardising this approach across States is important to provide consistency nationally. We have chosen this legislative response to ensure there is appropriate regulatory oversight on product stewardship organisations, which is not present in voluntary schemes.
The bill provides a comprehensive suite of considerations and oversight improvements to ensure that brand owners take responsibility for products across their life cycles and that risk is managed appropriately to protect human health and the environment. The obligations on brand owners are appropriate, and the bill includes meaningful but measured penalties for noncompliance. There is a particular focus in the bill on penalties for noncompliance with safety requirements. Ultimately we are trying to protect the community, protect infrastructure, keep people safe and limit environmental impacts. The second step to addressing batteries is to draft regulations to make product stewardship mandatory for problematic products, including certain classes of batteries where there is an existing Commonwealth stewardship accreditation. This allows the Government to act urgently to address battery fires and reduce free riders in the system. A free rider is a company or organisation that is not paying into the system but whose products benefit from it. We will work collaboratively with industry when finalising these regulations.
Another reason we have pursued this action in New South Wales is that the Commonwealth battery schemes are voluntary, are inadequate for the challenges and, to date, have seen very low recovery rates of approximately 15 per cent. The schemes are not currently effectively able to address the challenge we face. Most embedded batteries—batteries encased in a product—are not currently able to be collected under the Commonwealth schemes. Fire and Rescue NSW advise that these embedded batteries are some of the batteries most likely to cause issues in waste management infrastructure. These batteries can be found in consumer household electronics, including vapes, electric toothbrushes, power tools and kids toys, and also in products like kids light-up shoes.
To address this challenge, we must evolve our regulatory response and respond to the greater risk. Under the current settings and voluntary schemes, the prevalence of fires, deaths and injuries is escalating. We want to achieve the best possible outcomes, and the success of the container deposit scheme [CDS], Return and Earn, is recognition that mandatory product stewardship can provide a very successful model. The CDS scheme has resulted in over 90 per cent of drink containers returned and 82 per cent of the community participating in returning containers through the scheme.
The Environment Protection Authority [EPA] has engaged extensively with stakeholders on the risks posed by batteries, the current product stewardship arrangements and on opportunities for reform. This included during the preparation of a draft regulatory impact statement in 2024, which was done in collaboration with the Victorian Government's Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action. The Government has reflected that feedback as much as possible in this legislation. I thank everyone who provided feedback on these important reforms.
This framework provides us the appropriate tools to escalate our response, evaluate our approach, adapt as we need to over time and deal with this challenging problem. We are committed to addressing the significant challenges in our waste system and protecting the community and the environment. There is a great deal of regulatory detail in the bill. This was set out at length by the Minister for the Environment in her second reading speech in the other place. For those interested in the detail of the regulatory aspects, I refer to that speech, which is on the public record. Batteries are an important component of our everyday lives and will be essential as we decarbonise our economy. However, the harms from battery-related fires, resulting from the incorrect disposal of batteries, is a problem we cannot ignore.
Fire and Rescue NSW has highlighted that lithium ion batteries are the fastest growing fire risk in New South Wales, and we want to ensure that we are protecting the people of New South Wales. Poor‑quality batteries continue to enter the market, with limited safety systems to prevent them overheating or igniting. Fires are igniting either spontaneously in homes, or when these batteries and products are punctured in a waste truck or at a waste facility when people dispose of them improperly in waste bins. While there are existing voluntary product stewardship schemes for batteries, scheme participation rates are as low as 15 per cent. This means that there are many battery suppliers free riding on the participation of others, which limits the funding available for schemes to deliver wide-reaching communications.
It also reduces the funding available for providing convenient and accessible collection point infrastructure. Mandatory participation in product stewardship would properly resource collection infrastructure and also public communication about problematic batteries and products with batteries embedded, and also tell people where to take these products to dispose of them properly. This legislative framework provides the appropriate regulatory oversights for dealing with a serious and a very dangerous problem. The framework can be used to establish product stewardship schemes for other products that may have emerging harms. The threat to human life and environmental health from battery-related fires cannot be overstated. Without comprehensive action to address the incorrect disposal of batteries, as the first product proposed to be managed by the improved framework set up in this bill, there will continue to be avoidable, preventable tragedies.
I take the opportunity to thank some key people who have worked closely with the Government, and with the EPA, in developing this legislation. I know these people will also be working closely with us as we develop regulations. While there are many within industry who have worked with us, I particularly thank Gayle Sloan from the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia, Brett Lemin from the Waste Contractors and Recyclers Association of NSW and Suzanne Toumbourou from the Australian Council of Recycling. They are all fierce advocates for their industry, for their members and for a better, stronger, safer and more circular waste system.
We would not be delivering this nation-leading reform without them. I thank Jeff Angel from the Total Environment Centre. Jeff is one of Australia's longest-serving environmental campaigners and someone we can always rely on for support and also for a push in the right direction. I also place on record the dedicated work of the EPA's waste and circular economy team, some of whom are in the gallery with us, together with the EPA's lawyers and the drafters at the Parliamentary Counsel's Office who have worked tirelessly to deliver the bill. This is an Australian first. We are proud to be the first government in Australia to pass a bill like this. The time for action is now. This is an important step in that plan. I commend the bill to the House.
