Plastics

Underpinning the plastic waste crisis is a campaign of fraud and deception that fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies have created and perpetuated for decades.

Through new and existing research, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling” shows how Big Oil and the plastics industry have deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years, despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale.

Now it’s time for accountability. 

Formed in 2011, REDcycle was a national soft plastics collection and recycling program. It operated across 2,000 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets and some Aldi stores, with customers able to drop off used soft plastics for processing.

Before its collapse in November 2022, the program claimed to collect 5m items a day. Prior to 2018, most of those were sent to China. After that, some were mechanically recycled into road surfacing, bollards, benches and paths in Australia. But a mid-2022 fire at Close the Loop’s Melbourne plant – where soft plastics were turned into an asphalt additive – took away a key recycling pathway. The fire was largely blamed for REDcycle’s suspension along with a “downturn in market demand” exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.

Coles and Woolworths said in April 2023 that REDcycle had been stockpiling soft plastics without their knowledge while the scheme itself claimed it had been holding on to the waste while trying to ride out problems.

The discovery of 11,000 tonnes of stockpiled soft plastic at 44 storage locations across the country led to the establishment of the Soft Plastics Taskforce under the aegis of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and chaired by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Its members – Coles, Woolworths and Aldi – were tasked with ensuring the rubbish would not reach landfill.

In March 2023, the taskforce released a plan titled the roadmap to restart, which detailed a phased restart of soft plastic collections in stores from the end of the year. That deadline was not met. The taskforce has, however, “consolidated and safeguarded” REDcycle’s stockpiles and will run a small-scale soft plastics trial collection in the coming months. Just 120 tonnes have been recycled.