By Adam Carey
The fire that gutted Close the Loop’s northern Melbourne factory exactly two years ago was blamed for killing Australia’s soft plastics recycling industry, but the company’s chief executive Joe Foster says it was in its death throes already.
The fire destroyed the main processing plant that Coles and Woolworths fed with soft plastics through their REDCycle program, but as The Age revealed at the time, in truth the company behind the program could not manage the mountains of material being collected and was secretly stockpiling tens of thousands of tonnes of it.
Close the Loop chief executive Joe Foster with a road additive made from recycled soft plastics at the company’s new plant in Reservoir.Credit: Simon Schluter
“This is the whole thing: collection is easy,” Foster says. “Recycling is deemed to be easy, though it’s certainly not. The problem is always going to be, who’s buying the [recycled] product?”
Soft plastic recycling made a quiet return in February when the three biggest supermarket chains – Coles, Woolworths and Aldi – put their collection bins back in service at 12 Melbourne supermarkets.
Crucially, Close the Loop is also back in the game, having opened a new processing plant in suburban Reservoir. The plant has just begun processing small quantities of soft plastics and is playing its part in working its way through REDCycle’s 11,000-tonne stockpile.
Foster says the company aims to achieve full capacity by year’s end, which means it could process 5000 tonnes of soft plastics a year, turning it into products like moulded plastic for packaging and concrete additive for roads.
Close the Loop’s new Reservoir plant aims to reach full capacity by the end of 2024.Credit: Simon Schluter
But he warns the project will only work if the supermarkets commit to buying as much of the converted product as they offload in soft plastic.
“In the past the companies have been paying for the process, and it’s out of sight, out of mind, and before China said no to receiving waste plastic, it was never an issue,” Foster says.
A soft plastics recycling bin at Coles in Brunswick, one of 12 supermarkets in Melbourne participating in the pilot program.Credit: Adam Carey
“Whereas now in Australia, we have all these materials that have been building up over the years, and nobody’s been wanting to take it. We’re saying this: we will take the material, but you need to commit to taking the same volume back in finished product, so it’s ownership of your waste.”
Coles, Woolworths and Aldi teamed up to form a soft plastics taskforce early last year, following REDCycle’s collapse, in a partnership that required the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s approval and ongoing monitoring.
According to the taskforce’s latest update to the competition watchdog, dated April 22, Close the Loop and CDRC (which also has a Melbourne factory) are on target to process the Victorian stockpile by the end of July and the NSW stockpile by December.
A taskforce spokesperson said the pilot program is aimed at testing the emerging soft plastics recycling industry on a small scale, before progressing to an industry-wide solution.
It also told the ACCC that “at this stage there is no end date for the pilot program”.
In the first two months of the pilot, the 12 supermarkets collected just over three tonnes of soft plastic, equivalent to just 0.027 per cent of the stockpile left by REDCycle.
The pilot program is not being widely promoted, but awareness is spreading through social networks.
Nancy Atkin, who dropped off a bag of soft plastics at Coles in Brunswick on Thursday, said she was alerted to the bin’s return by her sister-in-law two months ago. She has also seen it mentioned in a local Facebook group.
“I was extremely pleased. I’d been putting them in landfill,” she said.
Atkin said she had no idea where her soft plastics were being taken.
“I hope that this will go somewhere and actually be recycled.”
Dr Trevor Thornton, senior lecturer at Deakin University’s Faculty of Science Engineering and Built Environment, said the collapse of REDCycle had been a body blow to public confidence in recycling.
“Australians, we’re pretty good at recycling, we want to recycle, but … people are still saying nowadays it all just goes to the tip, so what’s the point of doing it?” he said.
Thornton said the problem required federal leadership, including a potential nationwide directive to use less soft plastic in packaging.
Australian governments and industry set four ambitious national packaging targets six years ago, to be reached by the end of 2025, including that 70 per cent of plastic packaging be recycled or composted.
But the organisation in charge of delivering on the targets, the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, conceded as far back as 2021 that the targets are not expected to be met by the deadline.
The organisation’s 2024 report on consumption and recovery also reveals that 528,000 tonnes of soft plastic packaging entered the Australian market in 2021, underscoring the scale of the challenge.
“What was being collected through REDCycle was maximum 7000 tonnes per year, which is a drop in the ocean,” Foster says.
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