Quote:The collapse of the country’s main soft-plastic recycler exposes vast hidden stockpiles of waste, and leaves supermarkets tasked with curbing the millions of tonnes of plastic that ends up in landfill each year.
That ignores the problem of microplastics, excessive packaging etc.
Quote:Liz Kasell says her purpose was “simple – reducing the amount of soft plastic packaging going to landfill”.
More than a decade on, though, the execution of her vision has proved more complex than she could have imagined, and 11,000 tonnes of plastic she saved from landfills is instead piled up in dozens of locations around Australia.
REDcycle, the business she founded, is under administration, having racked up debts reportedly totalling $5 million. The big supermarkets that sought to greenwash their profligate packaging practices and those of their suppliers by partnering with her company – apparently without knowing what was being done with their waste – are under pressure from environmental agencies to find safer storage for it, because it is a fire hazard. If a Coles or Woolworths dumps it now – or worse, burns it – they will lose whatever environmental cred they gained from the scheme.
Colesworths have environmental cred?
Quote:. . .the public’s desire for change was great and growing fast. Between 2019 and REDcycle’s collapse last November, collection volumes ballooned 350 per cent, and Australians were returning five million pieces of soft plastic every day, according to Kasell.
It was more than the company could handle, notwithstanding agreements with several processors and manufacturers to convert the plastic waste into new products – street furniture, bins, shopping trolleys, bollards, concrete aggregate for construction and asphalt additives for roads.
It was a good idea, but:
The supermarkets cover their arses:
Quote:According to the supermarkets, when REDcycle initially suspended operations it did not tell them the specific locations of its stockpiles or how big they were. They did not even have the full picture when they assumed responsibility for dealing with the unrecycled soft plastics, one day before REDcycle was put into liquidation. More sites kept being identified.
“To date, we have identified a total of 44 sites where REDcycle had been stockpiling soft plastics without our knowledge,” said a spokesperson on behalf of Coles and Woolworths this week.
Yeah right:
Quote:Jeff Angel doesn’t buy the supermarkets’ line, either.
“The supermarkets are now saying, ‘Oh, we didn’t know they were stockpiling. We didn’t know they weren’t selling it for recycling.’ My response is, you had a responsibility, given you were using that REDcycle logo to enhance your reputation, to really understand what was going on,” he says.
Nor was it just the supermarkets that wanted to bathe in the green glow of the recycling company. The REDcycle website lists a couple of hundred businesses – retailers, food and wine companies, packaging companies, pharmaceutical companies, apparel and appliance makers and sellers, even Australia Post – as “partners”.
But it was the supermarkets that directly engaged the public in the recycling effort that are most culpable – they now own the problem and are seeking a solution through a Soft Plastics Taskforce. It began meeting last December after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) gave an “interim authorisation” for the Coles, Woolworths and Aldi chains to work together in ways “that could otherwise raise concerns under the competition provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act”.
Problem big and growing:
Quote:APCO talked big. The 2025 targets, it said, “would require a complete and systemic change to the way Australia creates, collects, and recovers product packaging, and are an important step on Australia’s journey towards a circular economy for packaging”.
But the challenge was huge, as was amply shown in data pulled together for a national plastics summit and subsequent National Plastics Plan put forth by the Morrison government in 2021.
It found 3.5 million tonnes of plastics, including one million tonnes of single use plastics – 70 billion pieces of what it called “scrunchable” plastics – were consumed every year. About 84 per cent of all plastics went to landfill and 130,000 tonnes a year went into the marine environment. Of the 393,800 tonnes of plastics collected for reprocessing, almost half was still exported.
cont’d
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Soft plastic recycling disaster (Read 58 times)
