The Queensland Government is setting aside $100 million in revenue from the incoming waste levy in a bid to move towards a European model of turning waste into energy, the ABC can reveal.
The new fund, to be announced in Tuesday's state budget, will be available to private companies and local governments to come up with new and environmentally friendly ways to deal with mounting levels of waste.
The waste levy begins in January, 2019 at $70 per tonne for dumping general waste to landfill, aimed at curbing the transport of waste to Queensland from interstate.
Almost 40 affected councils have been promised advance payments to offset the cost of the levy in the initial years and prevent it from being passed on to ratepayers.
Surplus revenue from the levy will be rolled out as grants of up to $5 million on a dollar-for-dollar basis to encourage the construction of new large-scale facilities and infrastructure.
Queensland Treasurer Jackie Trad said revenue would be poured into the resource recovery industry development program over the next three years.
"As we look to build a sustainable economy of the future, initiatives like this not only support the development of new industries, the support Queensland jobs," she said.
The Local Government Association of Queensland's (LGAQ) is developing a plan to have no waste sent to landfill by 2028 and said it believed councils could join together to build up to eight bio-gas power plants.
While Western Australia is set to become the first Australian state to build a large scale waste to energy project, as yet there are no such proposals on the drawing board for Queensland.
The State Government hopes the new fund will help to attract seed funding to get large-scale projects off the ground.
On her trade mission to the US earlier this month, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk attended a bio conference in Boston in a bid to encourage more private renewable investment in Queensland.
