Soft plastics recycling has resumed in Australia three years after the collapse of the national recycle scheme. Australia's first large-scale soft plastics recycling facility opened recently on the New South Wales Mid-North Coast.
00:00Bags of waste fill the receiving floor at Australia's first large-scale soft plastics
00:09recycling facility.
00:11This is the piece of infrastructure that was missing.
00:13The Australian community was crying out to recycle their soft plastics.
00:18The facility can process up to 14,000 tonnes of material.
00:23It's working its way through stockpiled plastic waste left after the collapse of the Red Cycle
00:28scheme in 2022.
00:31Two to four truckloads arrive each day.
00:34The waste is gradually sorted into different grades of plastic.
00:39Our household soft plastics are really complex.
00:41We have our chip wrappers, we have our bread bags, our cereal inners, our biscuit wrappers
00:48and they're made from different material.
00:50Magnets in the machine behind me are used to pull metals out of the plastics and the contaminants
00:56fall down below.
00:57Optical sorters identify and separate different plastic materials.
01:03It's then washed and turned into pellets which are supplied to manufacturers for reuse in
01:10plastic products.
01:12Some processed material is sent to this facility on the Central Coast.
01:17It's the first in Australia to use recycled soft plastic in bottles.
01:22My understanding is that a plastic container could be recycled at least eight times.
01:28But at the moment there's no real tracking of that.
01:31Other processed material is sent to an advanced chemical recycling facility which uses hot pressurised
01:38water to reduce plastic back into its original form.
01:42We're taking the plastic back to its chemical building blocks, the oil.
01:46We can do that an infinite amount of time.
01:48So it's a continuously circular economy.
01:52In 2021, Lysella partnered with Nestle to produce a food grade wrapper using 30% recycled content.
02:00The company aims to build a facility in Melbourne next year where it will recycle food grade packaging on a larger scale.
02:08The federal government is committed to doubling circularity by 2035.
02:14But some suggest there needs to be a stronger focus on policies which aim to reduce plastic production and consumption.
02:22Currently, Australia uses about 70 billion pieces of soft plastics a year which amounts to about 538,000 tonnes and unfortunately only 6% of that is being recycled.
02:34There's a suggestion Australia should focus on alternative plant-based material.
02:40Because of the toxic nature of plastics and the impact on the environment, I think that a system where we introduce bioplastics in a way that's not single use, I think that will be the best system.
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