Furor erupts after sudden end to Australian soft-plastic recycling scheme

An Australia-wide recycling company has been forced to stop collecting post-consumer plastic film because of a lack of facilities to recycle it.

Melbourne-based RG Programs & Services Pty Ltd, which trades as Red Group, established REDcycle a decade ago. It installed collection bins at Australia's two largest supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, to collect "scrunchable" soft plastic. Plastics News understands there were about 2,000 collection points.

Elizabeth Kasell, Red Group Managing Director, said in a statement that REDcycle's "offtake partners" can no longer take the plastic, which was being stockpiled in warehouses. The collection bins were quickly removed from supermarkets when the scheme abruptly ended.

Kasell said Close the Loop Ltd., a publicly listed, Melbourne-based recycler and REDcycle's "largest volume offtake partner" had a "significant fire" in June 2022 at its TonerPlas facility. Close the Loop says the TonerPlas line is being upgraded and will be back in full production by July 2023, after which it will "require large volumes of soft plastic material to meet demands."

TonerPlas is an asphalt additive that Close the Loop says "melts into, extends and modifies the bituminous binder mastic in asphalt [and] improves the mechanical properties of asphalt, leading to improved durability."

REDcycle said Melbourne-based Replas, owned by Repeat Plastics Australia Pty. Ltd., the other offtake partner, has "experienced significant pandemic-related downturns in market demand [and] other challenges including the delayed commercialization of new products."

Replas manufactures and markets garden furniture, bollards, decking, planter boxes and other products using recycled plastic.

Kasell said the loss of the offtake partners "has put untenable pressure on the REDcycle business model" so it "temporarily" stopped soft plastics collection from Nov. 9. "RedCycle and its partners are committed to having the program back up and running as soon as possible."

Kasell also blamed a big increase in the quantity of plastic being collected. "Consumer participation in the REDcycle program is at an all-time high with collection volumes increasing more than 350 percent since 2019 and Australians now returning more than five million pieces of soft plastic a day," she said.

Kesell said the REDcycle team "took the unwanted but necessary decision to hold the material in storage in the short term". That was "not a perfect solution" and "at great expense to the organization" but REDcycle was "committed to keeping the material out of landfill."

Consumers are now being advised to put soft plastics into their home garbage bins, which means it goes to landfill. Australia's curbside recycling systems, run by municipal councils, cannot recycle soft plastic.

Kesell said REDcycle was working to find alternative processing solutions and end markets, "however they will take time to operationalize."

The closure prompted a Twitter storm in Australia with consumers complaining that they cannot now recycle soft plastics and many are angry that they continued donating without being told the plastic was being warehoused not recycled.

Some Twitter users claimed a lack of transparency, accusing REDcycle of only stopping collections after the stockpiling was publicly exposed.

Steven Cain, CEO of Melbourne-based Coles Group, which operates more than 800 supermarkets around Australia, many of which had REDcycle collection bins, said the chain was "working with government, industry and sustainability partners to find a long-term solution for soft plastics recycling as soon as possible."

Jeff Angel, director of the Sydney-based Boomerang Alliance, a group of 56 environmental groups, said: "The collapse of the REDcycle scheme and 'secret stockpiling' has revealed deeper problems that must be fixed if the community is to have confidence in plastics recycling."

He said REDcycle has been a flagship for "industry and government claims they are taking action on soft plastics recycling, but it has only ever been a small operation compared to the 336,000 tons of soft plastics used and dumped every year."

Angel said the fundamental problem of the lack of a market could only be fixed by mandatory recycled content rules, which were opposed by industry and government.

"All producers need to be part of a mandatory product stewardship scheme that requires investment in comprehensive collection systems and use of the material in new products. Reliance on the voluntary approach was always going to fail," Angel said.

"REDcycle and buyers of the collected plastics have been a good proving ground, but much more needs to be done to make it mainstream."

Professor Veena Sahajwalla, from the School of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, echoed Angel's view.

She said: "Any schemes to recycle are welcome but what is really needed is a more coordinated, systematic process around recycling the many problematic wastes not normally subject to traditional recycling services, including soft plastics and plastic/mixed material packaging."

She said a lack of recycling facilities, cost barriers for industry and councils, and technology to enable problematic wastes to be recycled contribute to the problem.

Sahajwalla also called for stronger product stewardship to make product producers and consumers more accountable when products reached their "so-called end of life, and better collection and recycling, using new technologies to extract and reform the valuable elements they contain."

Shane Cucow, plastics spokesperson with the Brisbane-based Australian Marine Conservation Society, agrees. He said the only real solution is for governments to mandate plastic reduction targets for big companies.

"Due to problems with degradation, soft plastics [can] only be recycled into low-quality products, such as road base, park benches and playground equipment. But our oceans are drowning in plastic, and there's only so many park benches we can build," Cucow said.

The Federal Government's 2021 National Plastics Plan (NPP) says more than 1 million tons of single-use plastic goes straight to landfills and about 130,000 tons of plastic leaches into Australian waterways and oceans annually.

NPP statistics said in 2020 that 12 percent of plastic waste was recycled and 81 percent went into landfills.