‘We can no longer limp along’: Plans for plastic packaging shakeup

Australia is falling significantly behind national targets to reduce plastic waste, with 29 per cent of hard plastics that enter households ending up in the recycling bin, and just 20 per cent of plastic packaging recycled or composted.

The co-regulator charged with reducing Australia’s packaging problem, APCO, announced on Monday it would slug businesses hundreds of millions of dollars by 2027 to push businesses to reduce packaging.

A “voluntary mindset” is failing to reduce plastic waste in Australia, according to APCO.Credit: Joe Armao

APCO chief executive Chris Foley told this masthead a “voluntary mindset” to reduce plastic waste in Australia wasn’t working.

“We’ve had enough of past practices and mindsets,” he said. “If we don’t lean into this, then we will just continue to limp along. A voluntary mindset is not shifting the dial.”

The push comes as a Minderoo-funded review study in Annals of Global Health published on Tuesday examined five types of plastic chemicals (Bisphenols and Phthalates, PBDE, PCBs and PFAS) and found statistically significant harms to both male and female fertility, birth weight, neurodevelopment, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and asthma.

A different study recently found prenatal exposure to BPA plastic chemicals increased the likelihood of autism in boys.

‘[We’ll never get what] we need if we’re relying on mothers remembering to keep, clean and take to the supermarket [their] soft plastics.’

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek

Nationally, Australia has committed to 70 per cent of plastic packaging being recycled by next year. According to the most recent figures available, we are less than halfway there.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last week told a recycling round table co-hosted by this masthead and Visy Industries that only kerbside collections of soft plastics would deliver recycling rates at scale.

Soft plastics are collected in a handful of supermarkets in Melbourne under a trial that repurposes old soft plastics into new products, but Plibersek said she would prefer collection to take place alongside household waste.

“We’ve got to work out how we do it kerbside because we’re never going to get to the scale we need if we’re relying on, let’s face it, mothers remembering to keep, clean and then take to the supermarket the soft plastics that their households use,” she said.

“It’s a big additional barrier to action for people who are already busy and stressed to expect them to be effectively the kerbside collection for soft plastics.”

Australian Food and Grocery Council chief executive Tanya Barden told a recent Senate inquiry that even at its peak, the now-collapsed supermarket REDcycle scheme was only collecting about 2-4 per cent of soft plastics on the market.

“One of the problems with the REDcycle system was the lack of processing capacity [and] that is still a significant issue,” she said.

“There isn’t infrastructure in Australia that can process soft plastic back into food-grade quality [plastic]; existing mechanical recycling can’t do that ... you can only put it back into road bases and bollards.”

Heidi Tait, the chief executive of Tangaroa Blue Foundation, a charity dedicated to the removal and prevention of marine debris, argues that just because soft plastics can be transformed into materials like decking and bollards, doesn’t mean they should.

“Single use is single use,” she said. “Those products that are meant to be the solution to our soft plastics [problem] are just degrading into microplastics in the environment ... we’re not actually diverting from landfill, we’re delaying landfill, and we’re giving these products opportunity to pollute again in process, by extending their life.”

APCO now plans to make manufacturers to pay more for flooding the market with materials that are costly to recover, recycle or dispose of.

Foley said this would take the form of vastly higher membership fees for businesses that don’t cut plastic waste, which would encourage businesses like supermarkets to eliminate and reduce packaging, and transition to materials that are easier to recycle.

The body will consult industry before outlining its new fee structure next year, but Foley said APCO wanted to raise hundreds of millions from fees, which would be invested to overcome economic barriers faced by some businesses that have hindered progress towards national packaging targets.

Brooke Donnelly, general manager of sustainability at Coles, said consumer concern about soft plastics remained high.

She was in the sorting room for some of the recent trials in Victoria, with soft plastics collected at Coles, Woolworths and Aldi, and less than 20 per cent of the material had originated in supermarkets.

“This is not a supermarket problem, this is an Australian problem,” Donnelly said.

“You can see material including postal satchels and plastic wrapping from furniture – you can imagine what it’s like when plastic from an entire sofa is pushed into the recycling box. The [suggestion] that supermarkets are the solution for soft plastics in this country is a fallacy, and all we’re doing is delaying the need to really nail into what the issue is here and resolve that.”

She said large corporates were struggling to fix the recycling problem with “very, very immature businesses” that lacked the capacity to do the job.

Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.