Going to waste: two years after REDcycle’s collapse, Australia’s soft plastics are hitting the environment hard

Comments

• blind3rdeye@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle” was meant to be a hierarchy, where ‘reduce’ was by far the best option, and ‘recycle’ was the backup plan in cases where the others were not viable.

  But somehow the message about recycling was twisted to the point where many people believe that mountains of waste are totally fine as long as it is ‘recyclable’. And so instead of reducing waste per person, we’ve increased it. Advertising and convenience seems to overpower any kind of good intention. Perhaps regulation is the only way.

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  • Sarah@piefed.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don't think there's any "perhaps" here...

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• rekabis@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  When you really look at it, only type 1 & 2 plastics are recycled with any real frequency (80+%). And even then, there is a subset of plastics marked with those two types which cannot be easily recycled.

  Meanwhile, while types 3 through 7 are “recyclable”, in reality these are actually recycled in the very low single-digit percentages. Most of the rest are incinerated or shipped off to third-world countries for “processing”.

  As such, most any plastic that are not marked type 1 or 2 should be binned with the trash, especially if said trash is going to be effectively and correctly entombed in a landfill.

  Not only does it contain said plastics so they don’t contaminate the wider environment (especially if the landfill is correctly designed with a liner), but it also puts them all in one spot for when technology unlocks effective ways of recycling these types - there are emerging companies that foresee a time when we will “mine” our landfills for resources, and our best current strategy is to contain and concentrate our waste in as convenient a manner as possible.

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• pulsewidth@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Plastic recycling is a joke. If you look at the recycling they actually did, it was only a few smallish projects like plastic planks for walkways and benches, and plastic carts and shelved for some Woolworths branches to put at front of store with a label to greenwash the problem. Hooray, now those plastic walkways and benches will slowly deteriorate microplastics into the environment around them under full force of the sun and rain.

  The only real solution is banning single use plastics and moving back to glass and cans - focus on things that actually are recyclable and get rid of all the plastic.

  Will it be hard and more expensive? Yes. Is it worth it and will reduce long term cost of pollution cleanup? Also yes.

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• shirro@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Saw a bit of another plastic recycling company once a long time ago. It looked very dodgy to me. I probably can’t say much more since the fraud case ended with a not guilty verdict and I don’t want to risk defaming anyone but the actual processing part looked like a pilot plant to me and couldn’t have been doing much volume while the offices were in a high rent location. It didn’t add up. I think it is in the interests of a lot of companies to green wash plastic packaging and some government funding of recycling operations has possibly been fraudulent.

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• Ilandar@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Does anyone else have a soft plastics recycling program run by their local council? We’ve had a trial for about a year, now in its second phase. Hopefully it can be successfully expanded to other households.

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• Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Why are we acting like this is an insurmountable problem?

  Hit the companies using it.

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  • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah this has always been the case but sadly it’s just not how things roll in 2025.

    I’ve always said, impose a levy on any product which contains plastic of any kind, and watch how quickly producers transition to something else. Start at 1% and increase by 1% per year. I bet plastic packaging would all but disappear from the super market by 2030.

    The single use plastics thing makes me grumpy because it doesn’t address the problem, but makes consumers feel like they’ve shouldered some of the burden so the problem must be fixed now.

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• tombruzzo@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This really pissed me off. I feel like some of the people behind redcycle should go to jail because they couldn’t make recycling work and just hoped it would sort itself out. When else do people get away with that excuse?

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  • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m not sure this is an accurate summation of the situation.

    Recycling pretty much doesn’t work practically or economically, never has. It’s not possible to collect plastic, and convert it into a product that has value, at a cost of less than that provided value.

    If this was possible, companies would do it. (I’ll forego a rant about one of the few virtues of capitalism, anyway).

    Redcycle collapsed after a fire at a warehouse or something. That’s a bit like saying my wife asked for a divorce after I accidentally shit myself.

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    • tombruzzo@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I thought I remembered reading they came out with this big promise to recycle soft plastics amd for everyone to redirect soft plastics to them.

      Then reality hit and they found out soft plastics aren’t that easy to recycle, and tried to keep things going anyway, in a way that wasn’t representative of the company’s situation

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• BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Lack of recyclability shits me. Especially when something that used to be packaged in cardboard is suddenly being sold in plastic.

  Also, most plastic bottles are recyclable. Plastic bottles used for juice, flavoured milks, and water from the fridge section, recycle that shit! But not if it’s Ice Break. Those big chunky Ice Break bottles that seem no-brainer recyclable are clearly marked as non-recyclable.

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  • Salvo@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Soft plastics can be recycled, but the (trained) labour to sort is prohibitively expensive.

    Tyres can also be recycled, but the labour liability makes them prohibitively expensive in first-world-countries.

    They can also both also be processed as Biochar, but the environmental cost is also prohibitively expensive: tyres result in Sulfur-contaminated charcoal and soft plastics are not the most efficient material to convert into charcoal.

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    • appetizer@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My sister worked at a sorting facility. It is shutting down permanently at the end of the year.

      Not a good sign :(

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