As news broke in the mainstream media last night about the suspension of REDcycle’s soft plastic recycling program, which ran its collection points nationwide in Coles and Woolworths, PKN spoke to industry players to gauge the temperature in this messy room.
As PKN readers well know, flexible plastic, or soft plastic, is one of the most difficult packaging formats to recycle, reflected in its low recycling rate. In the most recent update on Australia’s progress towards the 2025 National Packaging Targets from the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO), the soft plastic recycling rate is pegged at around four per cent. The rest ends up in landfill.
A much-vaunted solution for improving this figure was REDcycle, Australia’s largest soft plastic recycling program, which grew from a schoolyard collection initiative founded by Liz Kasell, to a national ‘success story’, with buy-in from the two major supermarkets that implemented collection bins in stores countrywide. Consumers were encouraged to bring their soft plastics back to store. The Australasian Recycling Label, an APCO initiative gaining increased uptake among brand owners and the supermarket retailers, included an instruction for soft plastics to be returned to store.
Consumers bought in. REDcycle figures cited in reports reveal that up to five million soft plastic items were being collected per day. REDcycle puts the exponential growth in the amount of soft plastic returned since 2019 at 350 per cent.
The plan was to scale the recycling. But as reports in the mainstream media revealed yesterday, these plans have gone awry.
Rather than being recycled, it turns out the soft plastics returned to stores have been stockpiled in warehouses, a practice that is deemed an environmental and safety risk.
As investigations revealed the “secret stockpile”, REDcycle announced yesterday it would be ceasing collection via Coles and Woolworths.
Industry players PKN has spoken to, who wish to remain off the record, are outraged and disappointed, with many caught completely unaware and questioning how long this has been going on, and whether it was known by the two retailers and APCO.
After being made aware of the severity of the situation last week, APCO has commenced an independent review of soft plastics recycling. APCO is committed to working with brand owners, and the packaging, waste recovery and recycling industries to resolve this issue and explore pathways moving forward.
“We know that soft plastic is a challenging packaging material for Australia and we have to get better at managing it," Chris Foley, APCO CEO, told PKN.
"This is a short-term glitch in the system largely related to the pandemic coinciding with unforeseen challenges experienced by reprocessing partners. Strong, positive moves for soft plastics recycling are on the horizon - capital investment is happening and capacity will soon be coming through.
“While it's disappointing to see the program be put on hold, this is a good opportunity for Australia's brand owners and the packaging and recycling industries to pause and reset on how we manage soft plastics.
"This reset will allow Australia to build ongoing sustainable pathways for soft plastic and APCO is working with industry stakeholders to resolve the issue and develop a strong, permanent solution.”
REDcycle issued a statement yesterday saying that it would “temporarily pause its soft plastics collection program from 9 November 2022” and that REDcycle and its partners “are committed to having the program back up and running as soon as possible”.
REDcycle cited as the reason “several unforeseen challenges exacerbated by the pandemic which had led its recycling partners to temporarily stop accepting and processing soft plastics, placing “untenable pressure on the REDcycle business model”.
REDcycle said holding the material in storage was intended to be a “short term” measure, undertaken at “great personal expense to the organisation”. It says it remains “fundamentally and profoundly committed to keeping the material out of landfill”.
Liz Kasell, CEO and founder of REDcycle commented: “Since I started REDcycle 10 years ago I have been trying to do the right thing for the community and for the planet. I started this program from my kitchen table when I looked at a bag of peas and asked why on earth can’t this be recycled? Through this program my goal has been to enable and empower people in the community like me to make a positive impact on the environment. Since we started, we have prevented 5.4 billion pieces of soft plastic entering landfill and our natural environments.”
Kasell said the team is “devastated” to have to pause the program. “We are going to do everything that we can, in partnership with retail, industry and government, to have it back up and running again soon.”
One of the unforeseen challenges was that one of the biggest recyclers of REDcycle material, Melbourne-based Close the Loop (a division of Close the Loop Group) had a fire at its recycling plant earlier this year. The fire impacted the TonerPlas production line, which is now being rebuilt, but will only be up and running by the middle of next year.
PKN spoke to Close the Loop Group CEO Joe Foster, who confirmed that in Australia, Close the Loop Group is the largest user of the post-consumer soft plastics collected through the REDcycle program, which it recycles along with mixed plastic packaging from other sources.
“We’ve worked tirelessly over the last four years to develop high value, high volume solutions for the very complex mixed post-consumer soft plastics stream collected by REDcycle,” Foster told PKN. “Since 2018, Close the Loop has recycled significant volumes of REDcycle material. Being a zero waste to landfill company we can process 100 per cent of the REDcycle material.”
Foster said these materials form a main ingredient in Close the Loop’s high performance asphalt additive TonerPlas, as well as its recycled plastic injection-molding resin rFlex.
“We understand that such a diverse mix of soft plastics is not attractive to many in Australia’s plastics recycling industry, and not suited to chemical recycling either in its current form, but it still has value if you know how to extract it,” Foster said.
“We are planning to build multiple dedicated plants to process this material over the coming months and years and would hate to see all the hard work by REDcycle and Close the Loop go to waste, literally. We want to continue to support REDcycle and the multiple brands that have stood by the circular economy program spanning back over the past 10 years.”
REDcycle confirmed in its statement that Close the Loop has provided a letter of intent to continue to accept significant volumes of REDcycle soft plastic, commencing early to mid-next year when their processing lines are operational again. It said Close the Loop’s new processing lines will be able to process up to 5000 tonnes of REDcycle material per annum, which equates to nearly a year of REDcycle’s total collections. (REDcycle said it collects approximately 7,000 tonnes per year.)
Two other recyclers of REDcycle material have also left the program. Plastic Forests, a recycling partner that makes a range of products from recycled soft plastics, including gardening kits, parted ways with the program in February. Replas, who had incorporated small amounts of the REDcycle material into its recycled plastic outdoor furniture and decking products, stopped accepting REDcycle plastics as of last week due to oversupply.
While the REDcycle collection is suspended, consumers will have to no choice but to put all soft plastic into the regular waste bin, destined for landfill.
In this editor’s opinion, the repercussion of this news will be huge in terms of eroding consumer trust in soft plastics recycling when the project gets back on track, and eroding confidence in all on-pack recycling instructions delivered by the ARL. Packaging teams who are working towards achieving National Packaging Targets, and in some cases towards achieving CEFLEX accreditation, will be devastated by this setback. And then there’s the cost of changing labels on packaging that currently state ‘return to store’. It's a sad indictment on the plastics recycling industry, and highlights how the lack of infrastructure and ultimately pull-through demand for the recycled end-product continues to undermine efforts to scale soft plastics ecycling. It casts a shadow on the positive efforts and change achieved to date across the packaging industry. The full extent of the fall-out remains to be seen. I predict fibre-based packaging demand, already at an all-time high, will soar in the short term. The growth of flexible packaging will, however, continue. The many merits of the packaging format will outweigh the recyclability conundrum, and globally progress is being made on this front which hopefully will be emulated here once we increase recycling capacity. Development of monomer flexible materials is also advancing apace, making recycling flexible pouches, the most popular format, a more viable proposition.
The internet was alight with comments on the issue. On Reddit user comments expressed frustration, one saying, “I've been trying to do the right thing as much as possible. I recycle. I save soft plastics. I reuse. Is there actually any point?”, with another commenting, “People need to realise that the notion of individuals doing their part for the environment, is, and always has been, corporate propaganda. The term ‘carbon footprint’ was invented by BP. Recycling started as an advertising campaign by the plastics lobby and barely anything actually gets recycled,” and another, “Called it. Paper and plastic recycling is a scam”, the comments underlying the immense damage to the industry's reputation the secret stockpiling has caused.
Support for Liz Kasell has also been expressed, with global plastics recycling guru, Professor Ed Kosior, the founder of Nextek posting on LinkedIn that Kasell is an "inspiring pioneer that has shown the way for so many people in sustainability with [her] adventurous courage and initiative. I am amazed that the supermarkets and film producers have not launched a product innovation quest to find markets for these collected films."
Jeff Angel, director of Boomerang Alliance, said the collapse of the REDcycle soft plastics recycling scheme and ‘’secret stockpiling’’ has revealed deeper problems that must be fixed if the community is to have confidence in plastics recycling.
‘’REDcycle has been the flagship of industry and government claims they are taking action on soft plastics recycling, but it has only ever been a small operation compared to the 336,000 tonnes of soft plastics used and dumped every year. The fundamental problem is the lack of a market to support an ongoing effort and this can only be fixed by mandatory recycled content rules, which to date have been opposed by industry and government," said Angel.
‘’All producers need to be part of a mandatory product stewardship scheme that requires investment in comprehensive collection systems and use of the material in new products. This can be achieved under federal law; or a state like NSW which has some good legislation. Reliance on the voluntary, small scale approach was always going to fail. Producers also need to find alternatives to plastic, so the pollution problem is lessened.’
‘’REDcycle and buyers of the collected plastics have been a good proving ground, but much more needs to be done to make it mainstream. Use of reprocessed material should not be an option in roads or new packaging. This has been a fundamental flaw in the National Packaging Plan which won’t reach its 2025 targets. Environment ministers need to take forceful action. Putting a label on packaging that says ‘’recyclable’’ does not mean it is recycled in practice or at scale."
PKN will update this story as it develops.
The article has been updated to include comments from APCO and Boomerang Alliance since it was first published.
