Two years on from REDcycle’s collapse, 94% of Australia’s soft plastics are still headed for landfill. Collection has restarted at supermarkets, and 42 warehouses of plastics have been cleared, but experts say the packaging industry must take responsibility for the mess.

By July, supermarkets had mostly cleared the stockpiles, which by November 2022 reached 11,000 tonnes of soft plastics at 44 sites across the country, hoards accumulated as collections outstripped available recycling capacity and export restrictions increased the amount of plastic waste in Australia.

The remainder – 3,500 tonnes at two sites, in Victoria and in South Australia – is due to be processed in the first half of 2026, according to the supermarket members of the Soft Plastics Taskforce.

But as more than 100 new collection points have been rolled out since June in selected Woolworths, Coles and Aldi stores across New South Wales and Victoria, taskforce members have been careful not to collect more than can be processed.

There is simply not enough soft plastic recycling capacity in Australia to support full, nationwide collections Soft Plastics Taskforce spokesperson

“The biggest challenge still remains that there is simply not enough soft plastic recycling capacity in Australia to support full, nationwide collections,” a spokesperson for the taskforce told the Guardian.

Soft plastic is defined by its ability to be scrunched into a ball, unlike “rigid” plastics, which are moulded to hold their shape. Even at the peak of its operations in 2022, REDcycle was collecting about 7,500 tonnes – less than 2% of the 538,000 tonnes of plastic bags, food wrappers, bubble wrap and other “flexible” plastic waste produced in Australia each year.

“We still have a real problem in that we consume too much [soft plastics], we discard too much and we don’t buy back anywhere near enough,” says Gayle Sloan, the chief executive of the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia.

While recyclers are increasing their capacity to process the material, Sloan says other problems remain: the vast quantities produced, design packaging that is too complex to recover and the lack of demand from packaging companies and other consumers for Australian-made recycled plastic.

She says the onus should be on plastic manufacturers to invest in facilities to take back their own material. “We’ve got to stop putting it on consumers to solve the problem.”

Despite national packaging targets set by governments in 2018 for 70% of plastic packaging to be recycled by 2025, only about 6% of used and discarded soft plastics were being baled, sorted, shredded, washed, melted – or chemically processed – and turned into new products, according to data published in December by Soft Plastics Stewardship Australia. The rest has headed to landfill.

Consumer plastics collected by households, while the most visible, are only one part of the story.

Soft plastics are embedded in so many aspects of modern life, says David Hodge, the managing director of recycling company Plastic Forests. The material is widely used, for example, in sectors such as agriculture for storing grain and preventing weeds, and in transport for wrapping pallets.

Consumer materials, particularly those used for foods – frozen produce bags, cereal liners or bread bags – are “tremendously hard to recycle, some of them impossible”, he says. They are often “super technical”, comprising different types of plastic, and contaminated by inks used for advertising, or food residues.

While there is value for recyclers in processing plastics, such as PET (or polyethylene terephthalate) in drink bottles collected in container deposit schemes, Hodge says “the economics is broken in soft plastics” because the energy, labor and transport required to collect, process and recycle them costs more than importing new materials.

View image in fullscreen Soft plastics are often ‘tremendously hard to recycle’. Photograph: Tim Gainey/Alamy

The lack of incentives or mandates for products made from recycled content – such as fence posts and garden edging, electrical cable cover and plastic sheeting – mean they often struggled to compete with non-recycled products.

“There has to be support for the purchase of products. That will create the pull through,” Hodge says.

“Bunnings needs to be given a federal government mandate to support Australian made recycled products,” he says as an example.

Jennifer Macklin, a researcher at Monash University’s Sustainable Development Institute, says the solutions to the soft plastics problem are similar to other material and waste challenges.

They include designing plastic packaging so it can be more easily recycled (while retaining its function, such as keeping food fresh), developing recycling infrastructure capable of turning large volumes of soft plastic waste into a usable material and – crucially – reinforcing demand for the recovered material.

We’ve got to stop putting it on consumers to solve the problem Gayle Sloan, Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia

“That’s the big chicken and egg that we have with recycling,” Macklin says. “We’re quite good at collecting and reprocessing but not very good at buying it to turn it into new things.”

Consumers have a role to play, she says, but as a general principle producers and importers of plastics should be responsible for the material’s entire lifecycle.

In late 2024, the federal government consulted on options for reforming plastic packaging. According to its summary, 80% of stakeholders supported regulation, and 65% supported an extended responsibility scheme that would make plastics producers responsible for the entire product lifecycle.

The government is now “working with industry and state and territory governments to deliver fit-for-purpose packaging regulations as part of Australia’s transition to a circular economy”, a departmental spokesperson said.

Sloan says voluntary approaches have failed.

“We need to have clear design standards and they need to be enforceable, and we actually need those who make this to be held accountable and invest in facilities to take it back,” she says.

“We’ve got to stop putting products out on the market that have no home and can’t be recovered.”