A new soft plastics recycling scheme is replacing Australia’s failed REDcycle. Will it mean consumers have to pay more?

Vegetables wrapped in plastic at a supermarket. Australia is nowhere near meeting targets for recycling plastic packaging. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Almost three years after the collapse of the national soft plastics collection and recycling program REDCycle, the consumer regulator is set to greenlight an industry-led replacement scheme.

But there are concerns product manufacturers and the major supermarkets will shift the program’s costs on to consumers rather than change their own behaviour of producing and stocking vast quantities of soft plastics that mostly end up in landfill.