Plastics

I was at a United Nations treaty negotiation in Ottawa, Ontario, and an industry group had set up a nearby showcase. On display was a case of Heinz baked beans, packaged in “39% recycled plastic*.” (The asterisk took me down an online rabbit hole about certification and circularity. Heinz didn’t respond to my questions.)

This, too, was part of an old trial. The beans were expired.

Pyrolysis is a “fairy tale,” I heard from Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the environmental justice network Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. He said he’s been hearing pyrolysis claims since the ’90s but has yet to see proof it works as promised.

“If anyone has cracked the code for a large-scale, efficient and profitable way to turn plastic into plastic,” he said, “every reporter in the world” would get a tour.

If I did get a tour, I wondered, would I even see all of that stubborn, dirty plastic they were supposedly recycling?

The industry’s marketing implied we could soon toss sandwich bags and string cheese wrappers into curbside recycling bins, where they would be diverted to pyrolysis plants. But I grew skeptical as I watched a webinar for ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology, the kind used to make the fruit cup. The company showed photos of plastic packaging and oil field equipment as examples of its starting material but then mentioned something that made me sit up straight: It was using pre-consumer plastic to “give consistency” to the waste stream.

Chemical plants need consistency, so it’s easier to use plastic that hasn’t been gunked up by consumer use, Jenkins explained.

But plastic waste that had never been touched by consumers, such as industrial scrap found at the edges of factory molds, could easily be recycled the old-fashioned way. Didn’t that negate the need for this more polluting, less efficient process?

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.