Now Woolies and Coles aren't an option, how can you recycle soft plastics in Australia?
Author: Daniel Jeffrey
According to research by the Minderoo Foundation, Australia leads the world in plastic use, with an average of 60kg used per person, per year. Making things worse is the amount that ends up getting reused. For four years, just 16 per cent of plastics in Australia has been recycled. Different data, this time from the Australian government's National Plastics Plan, the nation goes through 70 billion pieces of soft plastics each and every year – that's almost 3000 pieces per person. The federal government had previously provided the Australian Food and Grocery Council for it to work on developing more sustainable uses for recycled plastics. More recently, the government signed up to the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution – an international push to end plastic pollution – and committed to recycling all plastics in the country by 2040. In October, state and federal ministers also set a number of targets for 2025. These include making packaging 100 per cent reusable, recyclable or compostable, ensuring that 70 per cent of plastic packaging is recycled or composted, and ending unnecessary single-use plastics.