Your soft plastic bags can once again be recycled. Here's how
SOURCE:ABC Australia|BY:Emma Siossian and Sarah Forster
Australia's first large-scale soft plastics recycling facility is processing huge loads each day, turning waste into a useful raw material.
If you cringe at the thought of tossing another bread bag or chip packet into your red bin, brace yourself for some good news.
Three years after the collapse of the collection scheme REDcycle, soft plastics recycling has resumed through kerbside and supermarket collection schemes.
So, what is different this time round?
Bags of waste on the factory receiving floor. (ABC News: Emma Siossian)
The recent opening of Australia's first large-scale soft plastics recycling facility on the New South Wales Mid North Coast could mark the start of a new era.
The facility at Kundle Kundle, near Taree, takes nearly all the soft plastic waste collected through supermarket and council-managed collection trials.
Known as the Soft Plastic Engineered Commodity (SPEC), it can process up to 14,000 tonnes of material a year, with plans to scale up to 24,000 tonnes annually, and is run by resource recovery company iQRenew.
Danny Gallagher at the launch of a soft plastics recycling facility in Kundle Kundle. (ABC Mid North Coast: Emma Siossian)
"This is the piece of infrastructure that was missing," iQRenew CEO Danial Gallagher said.
"We have our chip wrappers, our bread bags, our cereal inners, our biscuit wrappers, and they are made from different materials.
"We have the equipment that can sort a bread bag from a chip packet."
The soft plastic waste moves through a series of stages, and is quickly shredded, sorted and washed. (ABC News: Wiriya Sati)
Where is the plastic coming from?
Mr Gallagher said the facility was receiving materials from soft plastic recycling trials in Queensland, NSW, South Australia and Victoria and some return-to-store programs.
"Woolworths is at 500 stores and that material is coming here, so the volume is starting to flow again," he said.
"At the same time, we are working with Soft Plastic Stewardship Australia (SPSA), which is running bag-in-a-bin trials around the country."
The large-scale household soft plastics recycling facility near Taree can process up to 14,000 tonnes each year. (Supplied: iQRenew)
The facility is also steadily processing thousands of tonnes of stockpiled waste left after the collapse of REDcycle in 2022.
"We are on the final tonnes coming in from around Australia from the REDcycle program,"
Mr Gallagher said.
"Currently, as we move through the remaining legacy material, we are receiving two to four truckloads a day at this facility."
The Taree facility is full of soft plastics from the collapse of the REDcycle scheme three years ago. (ABC News: Emma Siossian)
How does it work?
Soft plastic items are usually accepted if they are "scrunchable" and don't spring back into their original shape after being crushed.
Common items include plastic bags, snack wrappers and cling or shrink film.
The plastic is moved along conveyor belts and gradually shredded, sorted and washed, before being extruded into pellets. (ABC News: Wiriya Sati)
As bags of recycled soft plastics move along fast-moving conveyor belts at the SPEC facility, they are gradually sorted.
Magnets extract unwanted items, including metals from fruit bags, and optical sorters are programmed to identify and separate materials based on their different polymer [large molecules] types and grades of plastic.
The material is then washed and dried, and eventually extruded into flakes and pellets, which can then be used in a range of new products like buckets and plastic bags.
Clear, white plastic is the highest grade. (Supplied: iQRenew)
The extruders can process up to 750 kilograms of pellets per hour.
"It's demonstrated what's possible to get another second life of what was going to landfill in our household soft plastics,"
Mr Gallagher said.
Recycled soft plastic is transformed into pellets, ready for reuse by manufacturers. (ABC News: Emma Siossian)
"We have been working with nearly a dozen manufacturers over the past 18 months … because it's really important their products also maintain the integrity and do what they are supposed to do."
The cycle continues
Some of the SPEC processed material is sent to Trendpac on the Central Coast, which has become the first company in Australia to use recycled soft plastic in bottles.
Trendpac CEO Wayne Dicks said the company was trialling the use of processed soft plastics to make bottles for washing liquid.
Recycled soft plastic can be used to make new plastic bottles. (ABC Central Coast: Brianna Moylan)
He said if the trial was successful, at least 60 million plastic bottles made at the facility each year would be made partially of recycled soft plastic.
"When we started off with the journey around packaging, sleeves on the bottle were seen to be a sustainable way," Mr Dicks said.
"[Then] soft plastic was seen as something that you could not actually term as recyclable.
"So the partnership with iQrenew was about seeing how we can use soft plastics in a way that we can have them recycled."
Wayne Dicks says using recycled plastic in manufacturing costs up to 30 per cent more. (ABC Central Coast: Brianna Moylan)
Mr Dicks said the cost of using recycled soft plastic in manufacturing was between 10 and 30 per cent higher than products made completely from virgin plastics.
"So, from that perspective, we have to look at other ways of being efficient, so that we can soften that impact on the end consumer."
Turning plastic back into oil
Advanced chemical recycling reduces discarded plastics back into oil, which can be used to make new food-grade plastic packaging. (ABC Central Coast: Shauna Foley)
Other processed material from the SPEC facility is sent to Licella, also on the NSW Central Coast.
It is trialling a technique known as advanced chemical recycling, which reduces plastic back into its original form — oil.
"We use hot pressurised water to convert mixed end-of-life plastic into a recycled oil, and that recycled oil is a direct substitute for fossil oil in making new plastics," Licella's general manager of stakeholder engagement, Andrea Polson, said.
Andrea Polson says government mandates would help the soft plastics recycling industry. (ABC Central Coast: Shauna Foley)
"We can do that an infinite number of times … there is no limit, so it's a continuously circular economy.
"All plastics made through advanced recycling can be food grade, and that is really the critical difference between advanced recycling of post-consumer plastics and mechanical recycling."
Ms Polson said the company was aiming to build a facility in Melbourne next year, where it would make recycled food-grade packaging on a larger scale.
Hard and soft plastics are both suitable for advanced chemical recycling. (ABC Central Coast: Shauna Foley)
Boosting demand
iQRenew's Danny Gallagher said boosting demand for recycled plastic was a key aim.
"There is a demand from the community to do more with our soft plastics … at the moment there isn't too much demand from a purchasing perspective," he said.
Danny Gallagher shows one of the products manufactured with recycled soft plastic pellets. (ABC News: Emma Siossian)
"We are putting a big call out to businesses and government to procure products made from recycled content and also a mandating of the use of recycled content in products would be very welcome."
Is recycling enough?
Recycled soft plastic is being used by manufacturers in the production of new products, boosting circularity. (Supplied: iQRewew)
With Greater Sydney on track to run out of landfill space by 2030, the federal government is committed to doubling circularity by 2035.
In December 2024, the Albanese government released Australia's Circular Economy Framework, setting priorities and targets to keep materials in the economy for as long as possible.
Australia's plastic consumption is estimated to steadily increase in the coming decades. (ABC News)
But the Sydney-based director of circular economy and waste at the Australia Institute, Nina Gbor, has warned that Australia "can't recycle ourselves out of the plastic pollution problem".
"Australia uses about 70 billion pieces of soft plastics a year, which amounts to about 538,000 tonnes and unfortunately only 6 per cent of that is being recycled,"
she said.
"That means 94 per cent is going to landfill or is being lost to the environment.
"We should absolutely reduce the amount of virgin plastics that we're putting into the system."
The Australian Plastics Flows and Fates (APFF) project has been run since 2000 and provides an overview of plastics flows across all polymer types and applications.
Piles of recycled soft plastic at the SPEC facility near Taree. (Supplied: iQRenew)
The latest data from 2023-24 shows Australia consumed 4 million tonnes of plastic products and packaging, an increase from 3.9 million tonnes in 2022-23.
The national plastics recovery rate (both recycling and energy recovery) was 14 per cent.
Ms Gbor said the use and recycling of soft plastics also posed health risks, and Australia should focus on alternative plant-based materials.
A pile of landfill at the Reedy Creek rubbish tip on the Gold Coast. (ABC Gold Coast: Dominic Cansdale)
"Plastic has toxic chemicals … there's always the question of microplastics pollution when it comes to recycling soft plastics," she said.
"The sooner we can find alternative plant-based, non-toxic materials, the better off we will be not only for human health, but also the health of the environment."