Two years after the collapse of the REDcycle scheme, nearly 95% of Australia's soft plastics are still ending up in landfill, with experts calling on the packaging industry to take responsibility for the ongoing crisis.
According to the Soft Plastics Taskforce, 94% of soft plastics are landfilled. While supermarkets have cleared most of the 11,000-tonne stockpile that accumulated by November 2022, the remaining 3,500 tonnes at two sites in Victoria and South Australia are expected to be processed by mid-2026. New collection points have been rolled out at Woolworths, Coles, and Aldi stores, but the taskforce warns that recycling capacity remains insufficient for nationwide collections.
Gayle Sloan, chief executive of the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia, stated, 'We still have a real problem in that we consume too much [soft plastics], we discard too much and we don’t buy back anywhere near enough.' She emphasised that the onus should be on plastic manufacturers to invest in recycling facilities, rather than placing the burden on consumers.
Despite national targets set in 2018 to recycle 70% of plastic packaging by 2025, only about 6% of soft plastics are currently recycled. David Hodge, managing director of Plastic Forests, noted that consumer plastics, especially food packaging, are often 'tremendously hard to recycle, some of them impossible' due to complex materials and contamination. He added that the economics of soft plastic recycling are broken, as the cost of collection and processing exceeds that of importing new materials.
Experts argue that mandates for recycled content in products could help create demand. Jennifer Macklin of Monash University suggested that solutions require systemic changes, including better design and investment in recycling infrastructure.
