Julia Schifter, VP of strategic analysis and public affairs at TIPA Compostable Packaging, examines whether compostable packaging can help Australia meet its 2025 plastic recovery targets.
Australia’s National Packaging Targets were born out of mounting pressure for the government to face up to the plastic waste crisis. The plan came with mostly positive feedback, and many heralded it as a much-needed step in the right direction.
A section of these plans establishes targets to make all packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025, and to have 70 per cent of plastic packaging recycled or composted by the same year. However, Australia is failing to meet these targets. Currently, flexible plastics and soft plastics that are typically used for food packaging have a four per cent recovery rate. The only polymer expected to reach the 70 per cent recovery rate is PET.
Boosting recovery rates to the promised targets will be no mean feat. Even with the current planned infrastructure upgrades, only an estimated 36 per cent of plastics will be recycled annually by 2025. Recycling also creates many ambiguities for the public and for consumers, especially in relation to food contaminated packaging and how it should be disposed of. Some prolific plastics such as films used to wrap food and other every day products are not economical to recycle, and are more likely to end up in landfill, incineration or the environment.
While recycling could be considered as part of the solution, compostable packaging also needs to play a far bigger role to fill the gaps where recycling is lagging behind. When it comes to secondary use, it offers a unique solution. Whereas the quality of plastic degrades each time it goes through the recycling process, and eventually becomes useless, compostable packaging is at home in the circular economy, leaving no packaging waste behind and restoring our depleted soils.
Compostable packaging functions like plastic and can substitute films and other ‘unrecyclable’ plastics. It also plays a key role in capturing food waste, helping to shift consumer habits around sortation, and offering a neat solution to capture and divert organic waste from landfill. When food waste goes to landfill it creates methane. By packaging food in compostable packaging people are more likely to dispose of their food waste in their separate food waste bins as they do not need to remove spoiled food from its packaging before disposal.
To tackle the issue of food waste, Australia’s food organics and garden organics (FOGO) kerbside collection services also allows for food waste to be collected with garden waste, which will then be recycled into compost.
Even though it is named as one of the targets in the plan, only around 42 per cent of households have access to kerbside organics collection services, and just 15 per cent have access to FOGO collection services. By 2023, all households and businesses will have FOGO collections introduced nationally, and food waste will be diverted into a greener system. As well as organic waste, compostable packaging must be collected in these if FOGO collections are to be a success.
South Australia is leading the way by including compostable packaging in their FOGO collections and allowing for compostable packaging to line their food waste bins.
While the National Packaging Targets are well meant, delivering on them in practice will be much more impactful. This represents a significant challenge for the recycling and packaging industries, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Recognising the role of compostable packaging and how the material can fill in the gaps left by recycling is Australia’s next step to achieving its targets.
If Australia is to get back on track to meet plastic recovery targets, compostable packaging can be the material to fill in the gaps.
This article was first published in the January-February 2022 print issue of PKN Packaging News, p32.
