We can’t reuse and recycle our way out of our plastics problem/Shane Sullivan, VP APAC at TIPA & Oshrat Adler Eckhaus, Content Manager at TIPA

At the beginning of 2023, the Australian people were shocked when it was revealed that hundreds of millions of plastic bags and other flexible packaging items, dropped off at Coles and Woolworths by millions of environmentally conscious customers, were secretly stockpiled in warehouses rather than being recycled, as they were supposed to.

It turned out that REDcycle, the main post-consumer plastic collection program in Australia, with over 2,000 drop-off points in the largest supermarkets in the country, has been transporting the bags for long-term storage - which some experts consider a potential environmental and fire safety hazard - instead of taking them to companies that use these plastic bags to make other items.

Yes, the Australians were shocked - but why? Clearly, this was a disaster waiting to happen. According to some within the media, REDcycle is to blame, but the recycling system itself is the real problem; it is the popular opinion that is the problem, those who believe recycling is the silver bullet that will solve our environmental woes in one shot. It will not. 

In most people's minds, recycling is a piece of cake. But recycling is hard: rigid plastics come in thousands of different types, each with different compositions and characteristics. All of them contain different chemical additives and colorants that cannot be recycled together. This is a global problem.

Soft plastic bags pose a greater, even impossible challenge, because they can be elastic, crinkly, colored, or metalized with a reflective coating. Hand-sorting each packaging is necessary so that it can be washed, shredded, melted, and filtered for impurities before being used to make new products. This is why only about 3% of soft plastic in the world is recycled - because it is just hard. 

Another reason why it didn’t work in Australia was because REDcycle did such a great job. No joke: it collected more than 5 million items per day, which amounts to about 7000 tonnes per year. Impressive, no doubt. But the only mass-use end product for their recycled soft plastics was roads, council benches and bollards; there are not enough roads, benches and bollards to be built with this huge amount of plastic.

Adding the fact that recycling itself produces microplastics that enter our air, water, and food and harm our health, AND driving on a road built with this plastic emits microplastic right into our bodies, sums up the entire process as complex, expensive, unhealthy, and even unsustainable. And when it comes to recycling flexible packaging, the conclusion is clear: it is just impossible, simple as that. REDcycle tried to do it but failed. And it’s not them. It’s the technology that cannot work with this material. 

So, what can we do instead? We cannot stop using flexible packaging, that’s for sure; we need them to keep our food fresh and our clothes clean. But it is time to consider alternatives, the time for Aussie ingenuity and know-how is now. We need to accept that there is no single solution that will solve all our plastic problems. But there are alternatives that can help: for instance, compostable packaging.

Many experts consider these types of packaging as the most environmentally-friendly; their flexibility, transparency and other properties are similar to that of traditional plastic, but with one key difference: they have an end of life: when this kind of packaging ends its use and is placed in a composter, along with food and yard scraps, a valuable and rich end-product is produced - a compost that can be used on agriculture fields to increase crop yields and retain more water, two critical needs as our warming planet struggles to feed its growing population.

A recent survey showed that more than 1/3 of Australians compost regularly and 36% call themselves compost enthusiasts, but they lack a garden to use the compost in. The encouraging results indicate that consumers are willing to compost when presented with a viable end-use solution. Furthermore, compostable packaging are designed to be collected via the FOGO bin in the country and be treated along with other food waste. South Australia is showing us how it’s done with compostable packaging being curbside collectible in FOGO bins.  

Despite its failure, REDcycle was a pioneering program that helped to raise awareness of the problem of soft plastic pollution. This misfortunate event could be looked back upon as a tipping point in the true development of the circular economy or it could be another missed opportunity for innovation. Crisis creates opportunity - let’s not waste this opportunity, let’s think differently.