The final keynote session of the Australian Institute of Packaging’s (AIP) conference 2025 and beyond saw leaders from industry and government come together to discuss the future of plastics recycling. The session was moderated by AFGC sustainability director Barry Cosier.
Andrea Polson, marketing director of Licella, opened the session by stating the importance of advanced recycling in order to meet the demands for the 2025 targets. She cited the example of the paper recycled content KitKat wrapper prototype, in which Licella played an integral role, saying that this validated what is possible when collaboration takes place.
Polson explained the benefits of Licella's Hydrothermal Liquefaction technology and outlined Licella's plans for scaling up its advanced chemical recycling capacity, which will see the first Australian commercial-scale facility built in Altona-Victoria.
Target feedstocks are end-of-life PE and PP from post-consumer packaging, mechanical recycling rejects, and product stewardship schemes.
The facility will be built in three stages, starting with 20,000 tonnes per annum capacity in stage one, and achieving 120,000 tonnes per annum by stage three. Licella is targeting commissioning in the second half of 2024.
Stop calling it waste, it's a resource
In his opening remarks, Darren Thorpe, managing director of APR Plastics, APR Kerbside and Australian Paper Recovery, summed up the entire conference, saying “the major word I have heard here is ‘collaboration’ and I am in the same space,” and then went on to suggest to attendees to “stop calling it waste, it’s a resource… we are not in the waste industry, we are in the resource industry.”
A changing of words may sound simple, but Thorpe’s comment had powerful connotations for how plastics are viewed. He claimed that Victoria alone could potentially see over 100,000 tonnes of plastics being recycled.
APR Plastics is currently engaged in pilot trials with the AFGC's National Plastics Recycling Scheme, converting post-consumer plastic to recycled oil using the pyrolisis process.
Julie Russ of Victoria's Department of Energy, Environment & Climate Action concurred with Thorpe that Victoria is a state on the front foot. She said that Victoria is the first state to talk about the need for harmonisation, citing its ban on single-use plastics, introduction of a container deposit scheme and standardisation of household recycling with a four-stream system. She suggested that soft plastics may also be accepted into the recycling stream at a later date, as well as beverage cartons.
Collecting from kerbside would achieve greater uptake
Andrea Baldwin, team leader for waste management at Albury City Council, shared a pilot program undertaken across Albury and Wodonga, in which households have been provided with a flat pack of 15 bags for disposing soft plastics. The bag is then placed in the regular recycling bin and collected fortnightly. If this was rolled out to 70,000 households, Baldwin said that would equate to 9.3 tonnes or 18,000 bales of soft plastic collected annually.
One pertinent point Baldwin made is that people generally don’t like the process of having to take all their soft plastics to the supermarket for collection. Being able to collect from kerbside, in her opinion, would see a much greater uptake.
Against the backdrop of successes Amcor has already achieved in terms of design for recycling – 95 per cent of what Amcor places on market is now meeting APCO guidelines for design – Richard Smith, director sustainability at Amcor Flexibles, said his number one goal in his role is to get plastics out of the environment and oceans.
He believes that advanced recycling is the only pathway available to us today to produce food-grade recycled content, and since the material has the same properties as virgin resin, it enables a drop-in solution. He said the certification Amcor is pursuing for PCR-content materials will mean brand owners can make credible claims on the packaging's recycled content, building consumer confidence in the value chain.
Smith cited several initiatives the company has invested in of late, saying that Amcor is “trying to demonstrate that a circular economy is possible with circular plastics.”
"At the end of the day, for us it's really all about local waste [resource] going back into packaging."
Smith ended his talk by alerting the audience to the need for collection infrastructure to get up to speed in time for all the projected recycling capacity that will be coming on stream by 2024/25. Without sufficient feedstock, these plants will not be viable, and the recycling system as a whole will not be sustainable, he warned.
As the event wrapped up, everyone concurred that collaboration across the value chain is the cornerstone of building a smarter circular economy, together.
