Supermarkets get OK on soft plastics recycling program

The ACCC have given Coles, Woolworths and Aldi supermarkets temporary authorisation to push on with their joint program to recycle stockpiled soft plastics.

The competition regulator is allowing the supermarkets to join forces through a Soft Plastics Taskforce, which was formed in November 2022 to address the fallout from the collapse of recycling group REDcycle.

REDcycle was declared insolvent last year after it failed to pay storage fees on thousands of tonnes of plastic, despite earning $20m from the Coles and Woolworths program that had run for the previous decade.

Woolworths and Coles said they would take on responsibility for tonnes of stockpiled soft plastic stored in sites across Australia.

The Soft Plastics Taskforce was responsible for finding recycling providers to process soft plastic stockpiles that continued to be discovered around the country.

But until now, most of the stockpiles have remained in storage as the taskforce signed up providers to be part of the program.

ACCC deputy chair Mick Keogh said it wasn’t until this year that recycling processors came on-board and had only just started processing stockpiles.

“It is important to keep the stockpiles out of landfills and this interim authorisation will enable the supermarkets to process the stockpiles with the requisite sense of urgency, without any disruption,” Mr Keogh said.

The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water estimated Australians used 70 billion pieces of soft plastics each year.

About one million tonnes of Australia’s annual plastic consumption was single use plastic with most of that ending up in landfill, only 13 per cent of Australia’s single use plastic consumption was recycled.

Mr Keogh said consumers wanted to see a return to in-store soft plastics collection and recycling on a wider scale and that a pilot soft plastics in-store collection point program would continue to operate at 12 Melbourne supermarkets.

“We are keen to see that this pilot program continues with some urgency and enables future expansion of in-store collections,” he said.

Given the level of consumer concern, Mr Keogh said it was important there was continued transparency about what progress the supermarkets were making in their processing of soft plastic stockpiles.

“The ACCC’s expectation was that the major supermarkets would not prevent or restrict recycling processors from dealing with other parties in any longer-term collection program,” he said.

“The ACCC understands that any long-term solution, whether in the form of an industry-led stewardship scheme or otherwise, is likely to be the subject of a separate, future application for authorisation.”