A federal Australian product-stewardship and waste-export term from the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020.
Waste material sits in Australia’s national product-stewardship and waste-export framework. It gives circularity and battery teams a federal vocabulary layer for discarded, surplus, rejected, or leftover material, while NSW regulated-battery scope and EU Waste Framework terminology remain separate source-specific concepts.
The source is the federal Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020. It provides national product-stewardship and waste-export context; NSW battery stewardship supplies a more specific subnational battery layer, and EU Waste Framework terms should be compared as related legal vocabulary rather than merged into this Australian source term.
For implementation teams, waste material is a framework term for classifying Australian federal waste and recovery contexts. Store it with jurisdiction and source metadata so federal Australian, NSW, EU, and standards-based waste concepts remain traceable to their own sources.
Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020
(1) Waste material means any thing (including a substance or mixture of substances) that is: (a) discarded, rejected or left over from an industrial, commercial, domestic or other activity; or (b) surplus to or a byproduct of an industrial, commercial, domestic or other activity; or (c) prescribed by the rules. (2) Waste material can be a gas, liquid, solid or energy, or a combination of any of them. (3) A thing can be waste material whether or not: (a) it is of value; or (b) it is or may be processed, recycled, reused or recovered.
Australian federal product-stewardship / waste-export source layer; not a battery-specific definition and not interchangeable with NSW battery-stewardship roles.
Reference: Section 15
Use this term when mapping Australian federal product-stewardship, waste-export, or recovery responsibilities. It is especially useful when a workflow needs to connect battery or circularity records to broader Australian waste-material language while preserving source boundaries.
For Minespider, waste material provides the Australian federal backbone for waste and recovery language. It helps product-stewardship workflows connect to battery programs without flattening federal framework terms, NSW regulated-battery scope, and EU Waste Framework concepts into one generic “waste” bucket.