Australia, Features, Industry News

AFGC says 100,000+ households ready to join NPRS

AFGC national recycling scheme tanya barden

The Australian Food & Grocery Council’s (AFGC) CEO Tanya Barden has called for urgent solutions to soft plastics recycling in Australia.

“A systemic challenge faced by REDcycle was the lack of domestic infrastructure to process soft plastic materials, and a lack of end-markets, which unfortunately led to the stockpiling issues we see reported in the media. This is a challenge the waste and resource recovery industry still faces today,” she said.

“The REDcycle scheme was ambitious and well-intended, but the initiative relied heavily on the public’s willingness to return their soft plastics waste to store, and at its peak, was only capturing roughly four percent of soft plastics recycling in circulation.

“While work is continuing on a short-term solution to REDcycle’s suspension, the Australian Food and Grocery Council is spearheading a more robust, industry-led solution to deal with large-scale collection and recycling: The National Plastics Recycling Scheme, or NPRS.”

She said that the NPRS tackles the problem at the kerbside, providing consumers with a more convenient way to recycle their soft plastics, taking it out of the waste streams and giving it new life, as part of a new advanced recycling industry in Australia that can turn used soft plastics back into new food-grade packaging.

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“We know this can be done,” said Barden. “The scheme has recently completed a successful trial of over 7,000 households held in six council areas across Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales.

Barden also said that preliminary data from these trials indicates people who had not previously used REDcycle’s store drop-off scheme have started recycling household soft plastics via the NPRS trials. The AFGC data shows that approximately 60 per cent of respondents said they had previously used store drop-off for their soft plastics, while a handful had used drop-off options at other locations, such as council depots.

“We’re now looking to expand the trials into larger-scale pilots, with a further 100,000+ households set to join the scheme from late 2023,” said Barden. “This phased approach will provide opportunity for domestic advanced recycling infrastructure to mature at pace with the scheme, and ensure it has the appropriate processing capacity required to deal with the increased volume of soft plastics recycling.”

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