Big 2 supermarkets ship plastic offshore for recycling

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The big two supermarkets are looking overseas to try to solve Australia’s soft plastics problem. Tens of thousands of tonnes of the waste has been sitting in warehouses since the collapse of the recycle scheme. The supermarkets took responsibility for the massive piles of plastics in February but they say there's not enough capacity locally to recycle it all.

Transcript

00:00 This is what 4000 bales of soft plastics looks like, stockpiled in a warehouse in Melbourne's

00:07 West for three years. Now the supermarkets are investigating sending the plastics to

00:14 Germany or the United States to be recycled.

00:18 The fact that it's going overseas to who knows what incineration, possibly recycling or just

00:26 landfill is just another element of the ongoing disaster.

00:31 Late last year the recycling company Red Cycle stopped collecting soft plastics. Australians

00:37 go through 70 billion pieces of soft plastics a year. A lot of it comes from here.

00:44 So Coles and Woolworths took responsibility for the 11,000 tonne stockpile in February.

00:51 They've spent $3 million making sure it's not a fire hazard. Now they're working out

00:56 what to do with it.

00:57 This is all clean soft plastics ready to be recycled. Bread bags, supermarket bags, that

01:02 kind of thing. But no one wants to buy all this because there's not enough of a market

01:06 for it here in Australia and that's what needs to change.

01:10 We're going to have to get from government and business binding commitments for recycled

01:15 content.

01:16 There are some local solutions. This council in Melbourne's south has started a temporary

01:22 collection of soft plastics.

01:24 The collection of plastics that I get from being a florist is insurmountable. So I just

01:29 started collecting it.

01:30 There's been a huge uptake. In the first four days of us doing this program we had 11 skip

01:35 bins full of soft plastics.

01:38 The council takes them to a manufacturing company nearby. But they can only take so

01:42 much.

01:43 We need leadership in industry and all levels of government.

01:46 The federal government says part of that solution is forcing industry to cut packaging in the

01:51 first place.

01:52 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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