Why Australia's Soft Plastic Recycling Finally Has Somewhere To Go

For years, the system struggled to process what was collected. That has changed. The harder part now is getting enough material through the door.

There is a particular kind of recycling guilt that many Australians recognise. You do the straightforward things: the paper goes in the recycling bin, the glass gets rinsed, the cardboard gets flattened. And then there is the bread bag, the chip packet, the frozen pea wrapper. You know they should not go in the recycling. You also know they should not go in the general waste. So they accumulate in a drawer somewhere, not quite waste and not quite recycled, waiting for a solution that never quite arrives.

For years, that guilt was at least partially justified. Australia's soft plastic recycling system was not functioning as described. REDcycle, the scheme that collected soft plastics at Coles and Woolworths stores, was stockpiling material that processing capacity could not absorb. When it collapsed in 2022, more than 11,000 tonnes sat in warehouses, unprocessed. The failure had multiple causes: China's decision to stop accepting plastic waste imports, the disruption of Covid, facility fires, and financial failures across the sector all played a part. That stockpiled material has since been processed by the Supermarket Task Force, with companies including APR and iQRenew working through the backlog.

The lesson the industry took from that collapse has shaped what came next. The new generation of soft plastic recycling in Australia has been built with a stronger foundation: processing infrastructure that either did not exist, was only at pilot scale, or was not operating meaningfully when REDcycle collapsed.

In Kundle Kundle, near Taree in New South Wales, iQRenew's purpose-built SPEC facility can process up to 14,000 tonnes of post-consumer soft plastics per year, turning them into shred, flakes and pellets used in products including fence posts, bins and packaging. In Victoria, APR Recycling has opened its expanded Dandenong South facility for advanced soft plastics processing, while APR Chemcycle has received EPA approval for a 10-tonne-per-day pyrolysis facility near Bacchus Marsh. Licella's Advanced Recycling Victoria project in Altona is a planned 20,000-tonne-per-year chemical recycling facility, currently progressing through feasibility and detailed engineering. These represent a significant step forward from what existed when REDcycle was running.

What exists now is a system that can actually absorb what households send. The bottleneck has shifted from processing to collection, and from collection to participation. Australia generates around 450,000 tonnes of soft plastics each year. Almost all of it still goes to landfill. Not because the processing does not exist, but because the pipeline of clean, well-sorted household material has not yet caught up.

That is the part households control. Separating soft plastics, cleaning them, and getting them to a collection point is the step that the rest of the system is now waiting for. It does not require a special trip. For most households near a participating supermarket, it is a matter of accumulating enough material to make the drop-off worthwhile when the shopping is done anyway.

The practical challenge is storage. Soft plastics do not compress themselves. A week's worth of packaging can quickly take over a kitchen drawer. The Shrinker! is designed to address this directly: it compresses loose soft plastics into dense nuggets, reducing the volume enough to make home storage manageable between trips. That small change in the kitchen is what connects a household to processing facilities that are ready and waiting.

It helps to frame this realistically. Recycling soft plastics is not a heroic act. It is not going to solve Australia's plastic problem on its own. But it is a contribution that the processing system is now ready for, and it starts with one simple decision in one kitchen: separate the soft plastics, keep them clean, and get them to the right place. For the first time since 2022, that decision has somewhere to go.

The system is built. The next move belongs to the household. And for most Australian families, that move is smaller than it looks: a dedicated spot in the kitchen, a product that keeps the pile under control, and the routine of bringing it along when the shopping gets done anyway.