Litter Prevention Program Evaluation

To support enhanced waste and recycling, the NSW Government was delivering Waste Less, Recycle More, a waste and recycling agenda for NSW that aimed to deliver economic, employment and environmental benefits for local communities and transform waste and recycling in NSW. As part of this, Waste Less, Recycle More provided $50 million to support the Litter Prevention Program in NSW, delivered through the Litter Prevention Unit (LPU).

In addition, in 2015 the NSW Government set a Premier’s Priority of reducing the volume of litter in NSW by 40% by 2020.

The Litter Prevention Program under Waste Less Recycle More was delivered over 9 years from 2012-2021, through a wide variety of activities and programs, encompassing: education and awareness campaigns, increasing infrastructure through council and community grants, increased enforcement, rewarding responsible behaviour, and monitoring waste.

ARTD worked with the NSW EPA to conduct an evaluation of the Litter Prevention Program over the period 2012–2021, with the goal of providing evidence, insights, and recommendations to inform the design of future litter prevention programs and ensure alignment with the Waste and Sustainable Materials Strategy 2041 and the NSW Plastics Action Plan.

ARTD worked with key NSW EPA stakeholders to develop a rubric approach. This enabled comparison of individual programs as well as collective assessment. Rubrics are used in evaluation studies to consistently apply evaluative criteria, particularly where multiple programs or elements are being evaluated alongside each other.

We applied this approach to look across six areas of program activity over the nine-year timeframe, and gathered evidence from documents, interviews and a partnership survey of stakeholders.

The result is a transparent and easily communicated assessment of program performance, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative data. Visualising the data in a rubric scorecard allows for an easy to understand overview of performance (see below).

Overall, we found that the program was successful in achieving outcomes and in addressing strategic objectives, and that it performed well on other areas with some opportunities for improvement. These were outlined in a set of detailed recommendations endorsed by the NSW EPA in full. Some of these are already being actioned.

The insights will be used to inform the development of future programs and to support the establishment of performance targets for these programs.

You can read more about our methods, rubrics and the results of the evaluation in the published report here.