The second week of November each year is National Recycling Week and research shows the majority of Australians want to recycle.
According to the 2022 Australasian Recycling Label Consumer Insights Report, 87 per cent of Australians believe that recycling at home is the right thing to do.
The Australian government agrees and has set ambitious targets, including a target of 70 per cent of plastic packaging being recycled or composted by 2025.
But the country is still well short of that target.
Just 16 per cent of the country's plastic packaging was recycled or composted in 2019-20, down from 18 per cent in 2018-19.
Flatlining recycling rates since 2017 and reports of warehouse stockpiles of plastic reveal serious issues with Australia's recycling system.
A tale of two bottlenecks
A 2018 policy shift by China to stop accepting a wide range of solid waste had major ramifications for Australia's waste management.
The decision meant Australia was left to figure out how to recycle and reuse its own waste rather than offshoring the issue.
In effect, it meant bottlenecks were created in Australia's recycling system, as single organisations became the sole recyclers for thousands of tonnes of waste.
When Melbourne-based recycling organisation REDcycle announced it would temporarily pause its soft plastic collection program on Wednesday, it crippled soft-plastic manufacturing across the country.
Partnered with major retailers such as Coles and Woolworths, the pausing of REDcycle's collection means soft plastics like shopping bags, bubble wrap, cling film and food packaging are now destined for landfill.
But even when soft plastics do get collected, experts say there is not enough demand to account for the amount of waste Australia produces.
Jenni Macklin, a researcher from Monash University's Sustainable Development Institute said there were simply not enough buyers for recycled plastic products.
"It's a lack of customers — whether they're individuals or companies or governments — buying back in large quantities these products made of recycled materials," Ms Macklin said.
"That's where the bottleneck is, this lack of markets to buy it back."
REDcycle said in a statement that offtake partner Replas had experienced significant pandemic-related downturns in market demand.
Meanwhile their other offtake partner Close the Loop — which repurposed nearly half of the 7000 tonnes of soft plastic that Recycle collects each year into building materials — suffered a major fire at their processing facility in June.
Close the Loop expects it will not be able to return to its previous recycling capacity until at least mid-2023.
The isolated events have all but ended soft plastic recycling in Australia for now, highlighting the fragile nature of the recycling system.
A system in transition
PlanetArk chief executive Rebecca Gilling said Australia was still lagging behind the developed world as it transitioned into its post-China recycling system.
"We are in a sort of temporary glitch at the moment," Ms Gilling said.
"If you look at what's happening in Europe, and we always lag behind Europe by five to ten years, there are countries in Europe which have zero waste going to landfill.
"We have a lot of the solutions in place, it's about the pressure to develop them and get them moving."
A pilot program to chemically recycle soft plastics into a reusable liquid form is in operation on the NSW Central Coast, while a Western Australian waste-to-energy power plant is slated for completion in 2025.
The Albanese Labor government has set aside $60 million to increase soft plastic recycling, but has also taken sharper aim at major plastic waste producers and wants to hold them accountable for it.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said that as companies such as Coles and Woolworths generate a large share of waste, they should be directly responsible to help recycle it.
"It shouldn't be beyond these big supermarkets to come up with a viable solution to allow Australians to continue to recycle," Ms Plibersek said.
"I expect Coles and Woolworths to step up and indicate how they will deal with soft plastic recycling. We're happy to work with them to achieve this."
In a statement, Woolworths said it was working to return access to soft plastic recycling as soon as possible.
“We are currently working through a range of options with the Australian Food and Grocery Council, the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, and the recycling industry to support the future of soft plastic recycling," a Woolworths spokesperson said.
Reframing our recycling mindset
With REDcycle's pausing on collection, the only option for the vast majority of Australians is to put their soft plastics in the bin.
It has prompted calls for Australians to rethink the way they consume products, rather than the way they recycle them.
A 2017 study from Boston University found that the availability of recycling meant consumers felt less guilt over wasteful consumption.
Gayle Sloan from Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association said Australians needed to move away from our "throwaway culture".
"I think this is a wake up call for Australia to recognise that we can't continue with business as usual," Ms Sloan said.
"If people want to do the right thing, they should avoid the creation of the waste at first instance and stop buying products in soft plastics, like we actually need to avoid it."
Ms Macklin believes the waste industry may have done themselves a bit of a disservice by setting up an efficient waste collection system
"We're so used to be able to just take our waste out, put it on the kerb and it magically disappears, comforted by the fact that people are doing the right thing with it," she said.
"We don't realise how complicated and complex it is."
