Australian container return schemes are a booming good news story

For the first time since South Australia introduced Australia’s first modern container return scheme in 1977, every state and territory in the nation is now paying cash for containers, with billions of bottles and cans being recycled and a marked reduction in coastal plastic litter.

The NSW scheme has collected more than 13 billion bottles and cans and paid out $1.3 billion in refunds since its introduction in December 2017, with 1.1 million tonnes of product being recycled.

James Dorney, chief executive of Tomra Cleanaway, which manages the NSW container return scheme, at a sorting plant at Eastern Creek.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong

In Victoria, an estimated 1.8 billion containers have been recycled through the container deposit scheme since its launch in November 2023. A government spokesman said Victorians had collected $186 million from the scheme, including more than $1.9 million donated to charities and community groups.

The last state to introduce its own scheme was Tasmania, which began operations at the start of May and collected more than 1.2 million bottles and cans in its first four days of operations.

According to a study published earlier this month in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, the density of plastic pollution had fallen 39 per cent over a decade in coastal areas around Australia’s cities, in part due to container deposit schemes.

It found containers were not the main form of debris found around Australian cities, except Hobart, according to a survey conducted shortly before the Tasmanian container deposit scheme began operations.

“Hobart, which did not have container deposit options at the time of the survey, was found to have the highest occurrence of fragment and whole beverage bottles compared to all other cities,” says the report. “This provides additional evidence that effective policies, such as container deposit legislation, can help to reduce plastic in the environment.”

The schemes, which see consumers charged a 10¢ deposit which is refunded upon container returns, are successful because they provide the packaging industry with a clean and reliable stream of material for recycling, said James Dorney, chief executive of Tomra Cleanaway, the joint venture which runs the NSW scheme.

Glass and aluminium can be endlessly recycled, while the plastic in PET bottles of the sort commonly found on supermarket shelves in Australia can be recycled up to 10 times before it needs virgin polymer added to uphold the quality of the material. As a result, container deposit schemes have an advantage over those that have sought to recycle soft plastics, which cannot be recycled into products of similar quality.

“The clear plastic that we collect [can be] turned back into flake and pellets and be back on the shelf in the form of another drink container in six to eight weeks,” he says.

Dorsey said that the scheme was so effective that more than 70 per cent of containers tended to be returned where it existed. He said in Norway, where Tomra also operates, more than 90 per cent of containers were returned. In that jurisdiction deposits are higher, and shops selling containers are required to accept returns.

He recommends people return uncrushed bottles and cans so their barcodes can be scanned, and that people reattach lids so they do not become litter.

So popular has the scheme become in Victoria, more bottles and cans are being recycled through container deposit points than are being collected by yellow kerbside recycling bins.

“One billion containers were returned to refund points in the first year of the program, and we have seen growth in our return rates in the second year of the scheme as awareness grows,” a spokeswoman for the scheme said.

However, experts warn that recycling is not a panacea for our plastics problem.

Professor Sarah Dunlop, the head of plastics and human health at Minderoo Foundation, said plastic was a toxic product, whether it was virgin or recycled.

As plastic ages, it degrades, shedding ever smaller particles of plastic. Most of us have heard about microplastics; the small pieces of plastic smaller than a pencil eraser.

Less well-known are nanoplastics, which are invisible to the naked eye but enter the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat, in ever-increasing amounts.

Over the past few years, scientists have reported microplastics in a bewildering array of places including human placentas, beer and honeybees.

“Plastic is a flawed material because it contains toxic chemicals … as a material, it can break up into tiny pieces of microplastics, which themselves are damaging and which also carry the chemicals in them, like little mini Trojan horses,” Dunlop said.

“And then the question becomes, what on earth do you do with this glut, these enormous, enormous quantities of plastic and plastic waste that are now on the planet?”

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