More than a year after the demise of REDcycle, Coles and Woolworths customers are still incorrectly being told they can return soft plastic food packaging to stores, where they will be handled by the now-defunct recycling program. So what’s going on?
What are soft plastics?
Simply put, they’re plastics that can be scrunched into a ball. The term covers bread and cereal packets, vegetable packaging, chocolate bar wrappers and clingfilm. Australians use 70bn pieces – or about 538,000 tonnes – of soft plastics each year, according to the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (Apco).
What was REDcycle?
Formed in 2011, REDcycle was a national soft plastics collection and recycling program. It operated across 2,000 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets and some Aldi stores, with customers able to drop off used soft plastics for processing.
Before its collapse in November 2022, the program claimed to collect 5m items a day. Prior to 2018, most of those were sent to China. After that, some were mechanically recycled into road surfacing, bollards, benches and paths in Australia. But a mid-2022 fire at Close the Loop’s Melbourne plant – where soft plastics were turned into an asphalt additive – took away a key recycling pathway. The fire was largely blamed for REDcycle’s suspension along with a “downturn in market demand” exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.
Coles and Woolworths said in April 2023 that REDcycle had been stockpiling soft plastics without their knowledge while the scheme itself claimed it had been holding on to the waste while trying to ride out problems.
What happened next?
The discovery of 11,000 tonnes of stockpiled soft plastic at 44 storage locations across the country led to the establishment of the Soft Plastics Taskforce under the aegis of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and chaired by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Its members – Coles, Woolworths and Aldi – were tasked with ensuring the rubbish would not reach landfill.
In March 2023, the taskforce released a plan titled the roadmap to restart, which detailed a phased restart of soft plastic collections in stores from the end of the year. That deadline was not met. The taskforce has, however, “consolidated and safeguarded” REDcycle’s stockpiles and will run a small-scale soft plastics trial collection in the coming months. Just 120 tonnes have been recycled.
Why does some packaging still come with the REDcycle logo?
Today, Coles shoppers can still see the REDcycle logo and read about the scheme on the back of many own-brand products, including brussels sprouts and corn cobbettes. Woolworths customers are advised to return some own-brand packaging to stores. Brands including Uncle Tobys, Kellogg’s and Cadbury continue to carry the REDcycle symbol on their packaging.
Both supermarkets told Guardian Australia the incorrect labelling was due to a desire to avoid adding to landfill. “Packaging is often printed in bulk and used across products for months or years, so we’re running down existing stock before we update the recycling label to ensure we don’t create unnecessary waste,” a Woolworths spokesperson said. The supermarkets also display in-store messages informing customers that REDcycle is no longer operating.
Are supermarkets allowed to provide incorrect labelling?
At the moment there isn’t an independent authority that actively assesses recycling labels on packaging to ensure accuracy, an Apco spokesperson said.
But Jeff Angel of the Boomerang Alliance environmental group says: “The current labels are too close to greenwash and too far away from independent tracking and verification processes.”
What will the REDcycle logo be replaced with?
Customers will begin to see a “check locally” Australasian Recycling Label on their groceries, Woolworths says. But asking households to check for local recycling options creates too high a barrier, says Angel, who believes the “industry has to be responsible, not just stick a label on it and say ‘it’s up to you, customer’.”
New details on reforms to the regulations of packaging at federal and state levels are expected in May. Angel hopes the regulations will contain “no escape clauses”.
How can consumers recycle soft plastics now?
Generally, they can’t. Most of Australia’s 60-odd material recovery facilities, where rubbish is sorted for recycling, do not have the physical ability to handle soft plastic, which is often highly contaminated by food and made of multiple materials.
A trial kerbside collection scheme has been under way in some councils in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, while Randwick, Hornsby and Bendigo residents can drop off soft plastics at recycling centres. Mosman, Central Coast, Newcastle and Tamworth councils all collect soft plastics via the Curby program.
How are soft plastics recycled?
Options are limited. Close the Loop’s new Reservoir plant in Victoria launches on Wednesday and will use more than 3,000 tonnes of soft plastics a year to manufacture its asphalt additive. Other mechanical recovery companies include Polyrok, Replas, Plastic Forests and SaveBoard.
A prototype KitKat wrapper, trialled on NSW’s Central Coast in 2021, was made with 30% recycled soft plastic from Licella, which converts post-consumer plastics to oil that can then be used to create food-grade plastics. Licella is yet to work at scale in Australia. Chemical recycling options are not yet mature, while fungi, algae, black fly larvae and even edible plastics might one day help eliminate plastic waste.
A fundamental problem with the recycling model is the small end market for expensive but low-grade recycled plastic. So long as the cost of virgin plastic is pegged to the low (and falling) cost of oil, why buy recycled?
So what else can councils do with our soft plastics?
Waste-to-energy treatment – burning plastics to salvage energy from their otherwise low-quality bulk – has been online for decades in Europe and is in development in Australia.
Otherwise, it goes to rubbish dumps – where 93% of our soft plastics currently end up.
“Plastics are inert and as long as they don’t leach chemicals into the groundwater, landfill is potentially a better place for them to go than using very energy-intensive processes,” says Dr Ben Madden, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney.
But there must be a better alternative?
We could use less plastic. Australia’s supermarket sector, which is valued at almost $135bn, has the power to drive innovation and push for non-plastic packaging, says Dr Tillmann Boehme, a circular economist at the University of Wollongong business school. “Supermarkets are one of the most powerful players in the supply chain,” he says. “They can have a lot more influence over manufacturers. They should lead, not be the last.”
What are Australia’s recycling goals?
The Australian Food and Grocery Council’s national plastics recycling scheme will see food and grocery manufacturers paying a levy towards recycling the soft plastics they create.
The government and industry’s voluntary 2025 national packaging targets aim for 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging, 70% of plastic packaging to be recycled or composted, 50% recycled content in packaging and the phase-out of single-use plastics.
The all-government national waste policy action plan is aiming for an 80% reduction of materials going to landfill by 2030 and to phase out problematic and unnecessary plastics by 2025.
Sounds ambitious
Packaging targets will almost certainly not be met. State, federal and local governments need to leap from a combined recycling rate of 40m tonnes to 60m tonnes in six years to meet the target of an 80% reduction of materials going to landfill. There is no way that can be achieved without new or increased levies, subsidies, grants, mandates or bans, says Mike Ritchie, the managing director of MRA Consulting Group.
How much would it cost to fix the problem?
REDcycle’s budget was too small, with Coles and Woolworths paying a combined $20m to the scheme over the past decade. In July 2023, the Albanese government announced a $60m boost for soft plastics recycling, part of a $250m commitment to the recycling modernisation fund.
Angel estimates addressing the problem will cost tens of millions of dollars a year. Other experts estimate that creating collection capacity could cost $180m plus $20m a year in operating costs. But that doesn’t cover the recycling to follow.
Who is responsible for our plastics problem?
“No one takes on responsibility for plastics,” says Boehme. Federal, state and local governments all weigh in as do industry, consumer and environmental groups, but “there is no ownership – it is a mess”.
Does recycling soft plastics make a difference?
Yes. But even if governments were successful in collecting and processing all soft plastics, it would divert only 10% of total plastics from landfill, experts say. So that bigger issue needs to be addressed, too. To put things in perspective, REDcycle collected less than 1% of the soft plastic used by Australians each year.
“We need to focus on the big waste streams and big solutions,” Ritchie says.
• This article was amended on 30 January 2024 to remove an incorrect reference to “thermonuclear” treatment of soft plastics.
