Australia’s backlog of soft plastic could be processed overseas before supermarket scheme is rebooted

Thousands of tonnes of soft plastic that was collected and dropped off by supermarket customers, and has been stockpiled since the collapse of a domestic recycling program, could be be shipped to the US for processing.

The Albanese government has indicated it would grant an exemption to allow Coles, Woolworths and Aldi to send the plastic offshore for recycling despite a national waste export ban announced by the Morrison government in 2019.

The supermarkets have announced they hope to start a new pilot program collecting soft plastic at some sites before the end of the year, but it would depend on first clearing more than 12,000 tonnes across sites stockpiled in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.

With no local recycling facilities available to deal with soft plastic at this scale, the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government would support an export proposal "when there is an environmentally sound pathway for processing this material for recovery purposes offshore".

"Ideally, any exported soft plastics would be processed into recycled pellets that can be remanufactured in Australia," she said.

Sources said the sites being considered for recycling the soft plastic include a facility in Texas. The supermarket chains are also in discussions with recycling facilities in other countries.

It is unclear how much of the stockpiled soft plastic is still in good enough condition to be recycled and how much has degraded. Some of it has been stored for at least four years while the company contracted to run the scheme, REDcycle, claimed it was being distributed for reuse and recycling.

The supermarkets took responsibility for the stockpiles when the contractor went into administration last month. Last week, under the banner of the Soft Plastics taskforce, they released a "roadmap to restart" that said they hoped to roll out a nationwide in-store plastic collection next year, but indicated it may not be fully operational until 2025.

The taskforce said it was working to restart in-store soft plastic collections urgently, but was "severely constrained" by Australia's limited access to domestic recycling that could manage the "mixed polymer" soft plastic.

The Boomerang Alliance, a coalition of 55 environment groups, said the plan was timid. Jeff Angel, the alliance's director, said it read as though the supermarkets had only just discovered there was a problem with plastic recycling when the challenges had been clear for years.

Angel accused the supermarkets of expressing "thought bubbles" and there was a significant risk that the 2025 target of 70% of plastic being recycled or composted would not be met.

"Notably, there is no firm commitment by the supermarkets to use collected plastics as recycled content," he said.

Angel said it was "absolutely vital" that governments regulated to make recycling targets mandatory and require nationwide kerbside collection of soft plastic, a step proposed by the Victorian government. He said REDcycle had been collecting less than 1% of the 449,000 tonnes of soft plastic used by Australians each year, and a more ambitious solution was needed than what the supermarkets proposed.

A spokesperson for the supermarkets said they recognised the need for a long-term national strategy to deal with the problem. A scheme that charges food and grocery manufacturers a levy to support soft-plastic recycling was being trialled in some areas.

"We recognise that, in the long-term, more soft plastic could be diverted from landfill if future schemes are more convenient for consumers and can meet soft plastic at the point where it becomes waste - the household," they said. "It is crucial that this opportunity to rethink Australia's future national soft plastic recycling model is not overlooked."

Morrison announced plans to ban the export of waste plastic, paper, glass and tyres in August 2019. He expressed concern about the amount of plastic waste ending up in the ocean and cited data suggesting just 12% of Australian plastic waste was recycled.