Comply with licence conditions
You must comply with all the conditions of your licence.
If you don’t comply, you may be subject to a civil penalty or a criminal offence. We may also vary, suspend or revoke your licence. Find out:
Keep records
You must make and keep relevant records about your waste exports.
Find out about the records you must keep.
We may audit your records at any time to ensure you are meeting your record-keeping obligations. Find out more in our approach to compliance.
Let us know of changes
If you want to vary your licence, you need to apply for a variation
You need to let us know:
- when any information or supporting documents you provided in your licence application have changed, were incorrect or incomplete
- when there are changes to your organisation.
Find out more about changes to your licence or business.
Renew your licence
Licences are granted for a maximum of three years.
To continue to export, make sure you renew your licence through our Waste Export Licencing and Declaration (WELD) portal.
You must submit your renewal application in the WELD portal at least 30 days before it expires. If you apply later than this, we won’t accept your application. You will need to apply for a new licence. We suggest you submit your application at least 40 days before your licence expires.
Licences for sorted plastic
Licences to export plastic that has been sorted only expired on 30 June 2022. They cannot be renewed.
From 1 July 2022, you can only export waste plastics that have been:
- sorted into single resin or polymer type and further processed, for example flaked or pelletised, or
- processed with other materials into processed engineered fuel.
It is important when applying for a waste export licence, that you provide enough relevant documents with your application for us to assess your application.
The documents you provide must support what you put in your application.
If you don’t provide enough relevant documents, we will ask you for them. This may cause delays as we can only start to assess your application when we have them.
All documents you provide must be both:
- clear and legible
- in English or translated into English by a translator accredited by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters.
Specifications
Your waste plastic must be sorted and/or processed to a relevant specification before you export it. In your licence application, you nominate the specification/s your plastic is sorted and/or processed to. You must nominate a specification for each type of plastic you will export for the duration of your licence.
These specifications could be:
- listed on our website (listed specifications) and/or
- not listed on our website (unlisted specification), for example, your importer’s specification.
If you nominate an unlisted specification, you must provide it with your application.
If suitable, we may ask to publish your unlisted specification on our website as a listed specification. Other exporters of the plastic waste can then use it.
All specifications must include certain details such as providing purity checks through analysis such as Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and Fourier Transform Infra Red (FTIR) for processed plastics.
Find more information about exporting waste plastic.
Find out about how to apply for a licence or apply for a variation.
Revoke your licence
You can ask us to revoke your licence. Email exportwaste@dcceew.gov.au.
You cannot ask us to revoke your licence if we have given you notice that we may revoke your licence.