Customers of Coles and Woolworths are still being misled into believing they may return soft plastic food packaging to the stores, where it would be taken care of by the now-defunct recycling programme, more than a year after REDcycle went out of business. ‘Soft Plastics’ denotes the balls of plastic that can be squished up.
Bread and cereal packets, vegetable packaging, chocolate bar wrappers, and clingfilm are all included in this terminology. Australians consume 70 billion pieces, or around 538,000 tons, of soft plastics each year, according to the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO).
Established as a nationwide programme in 2011, REDcycle was all about collecting and recycling soft plastics. Customers could drop off discarded soft plastics for processing at any one of the 2,000 Coles, Woolworths, and select Aldi supermarkets.
Harsh reality
The programme claimed to collect five million things every day before collapsing in November 2022. The majority of those were shipped to China before 2018. Some were then mechanically recycled into Australian bollards, seats, roads, and walkways.
However, a crucial recycling route was destroyed by a fire in the middle of 2022 at Close the Loop’s Melbourne facility, where soft plastics were processed to make an asphalt additive. REDcycle ‘s suspension was mostly attributed to the fire and a “downturn in market demand” made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
While REDcycle claimed to have been holding onto the rubbish in an attempt to weather difficulties, Coles and Woolworths stated in April 2023 that REDcycle had been storing soft plastics without their knowledge.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission established the ‘Soft Plastics Taskforce’ after 11,000 tonnes of stockpiled soft plastic were found at 44 storage locations across the nation. Its members, Coles, Woolworths, and Aldi, were assigned the responsibility of making sure the trash would not wind up in a landfill.
The task force published a roadmap to recommence the project in March 2023, outlining a phased restart of soft plastic collections in stores starting at the end of 2022. That deadline was not met. Nonetheless, the task force “consolidated and safeguarded” REDcycle’s stocks, and in the upcoming months, it will conduct a small-scale trial collection of soft plastics. Just 120 tons have been recycled.
REDcycle continues its presence
Coles customers can still see the REDcycle emblem and read information about the programme on the packaging of several branded items. Customers at Woolworths are urged to return such packages to the retailer. Cadbury, Kellogg’s, and Uncle Tobys still display the REDcycle emblem on their packaging.
According to Guardian Australia, the two supermarkets mislabelled the product to keep it out of the landfill. Packaging is frequently printed in bulk and utilised across items for months or years. Additionally, the supermarkets inform customers that REDcycle is no longer in operation through in-store messages.
There isn’t currently an impartial body that verifies the veracity of recycling labels on packaging.
But Jeff Angel of the Boomerang Alliance environmental organisation said, “The current labels are too close to greenwash and too far away from independent tracking and verification processes.”
Till then, customers will begin to see a “check locally” Australasian Recycling Label on their food, Woolworths says. In May 2024, more information on changes to state and federal packaging laws is anticipated.
How are soft plastics recycled?
It is physically impossible for the majority of Australia’s sixty-odd material recovery facilities, which separate trash for recycling, to handle soft plastic since it is frequently severely polluted by food and composed of several different materials.
Residents of Randwick, Hornsby, and Bendigo can drop off soft plastics at recycling centres, and several councils in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia have implemented a pilot kerbside collection programme. The Curby programme is used by the councils of Tamworth, Newcastle, Central Coast, and Mosman to collect soft plastics.
There aren’t many options. Over 3,000 tonnes of soft plastics are used annually by Close the Loop’s new Reservoir plant in Victoria to make its asphalt additive. Other mechanical recovery firms include Polyrok, Replas, Plastic Forests, and SaveBoard.
In 2021, a prototype KitKat wrapper was tested on the Central Coast of New South Wales. It contained 30% recycled soft plastic from Licella, a company that turns spent plastics into oil that may be used to make food-grade plastics. Australia has not yet seen widespread use of Licella.
While there are currently no developed methods for chemical recycling, plastic waste may eventually be eliminated by the use of fungi, algae, black fly larvae, and even edible plastics. The little end market for pricey but inferior recycled plastic is a basic issue with the recycling business. Why purchase recycled plastic when the price of virgin plastic is linked to the low (and declining) price of oil?
What are the alternatives?
Burning plastics to extract energy from their otherwise low-quality bulk is known as waste-to-energy treatment, and it has been operating for decades in Europe and is currently being developed in Australia.
If not, it ends up in trash dumps, which are currently the final destination for 93% of our soft plastics. According to Dr. Ben Madden, a senior research consultant at the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures, “Landfill is potentially a better place for plastics to go than using very energy-intensive processes as long as they don’t leach chemicals into the groundwater.”
“Plastics are inert. We could always use less plastic. The over $135 billion Australian grocery industry has the potential to spur innovation and advance the use of non-plastic packaging,” according to Dr. Tillmann Boehme, a circular economist at the University of Wollongong’s business school. Supermarkets are among the most significant participants in the supply chain.
Under the national plastics recycling programme of the Australian Food and Grocery Council, food and grocery manufacturers will be required to pay a tax to recycle the soft plastics that they produce. The voluntary national packaging targets set forward by the government and industry for 2025 call for 100% recyclable, biodegradable, or reusable packaging; 70% of plastic packaging to be recycled; 50% of packaging to contain recycled materials; and the phase-out of single-use plastics.
The goal of the all-government national waste policy action plan is to phase out harmful and superfluous plastics by 2025 and reduce the amount of materials that end up in landfills by 80% by 2030.
Likely, packaging targets won’t be met. To accomplish the goal of an 80% reduction in the amount of materials going to landfills, state, federal, and municipal governments must increase their combined recycling rate from 40 million to 60 million tons in just six years.
According to Mike Ritchie, the managing director of MRA Consulting Group, no way can be accomplished without new or higher levies, subsidies, grants, mandates, or prohibitions.
Due to REDcycle’s inadequate funding, Coles and Woolworths have contributed a total of $20 million to the programme over the previous ten years. The Albanese government committed $250 million to the recycling modernisation fund, including a $60 million increase for the recycling of soft plastics in July 2023.
Analysts project that the development of collection capacity may require $180 million in addition to $20 million in annual running expenses. However, that doesn’t address the subsequent recycling.
“No one takes responsibility for plastics. Governments at all levels—federal, state, and local—as well as business, consumer, and environmental organisations all have an opinion, but it’s a mess with no ownership,” Boehme said.
Scientists estimate that even if governments were successful in gathering and processing every soft plastic that would only save 10% of all plastics from landfills. So that broader issue needs to be addressed, too. To put things in perspective, less than 1% of Australia’s annual soft plastic usage was collected by REDcycle.
Ritchie said, “We need to concentrate on the large waste streams and large solutions.”