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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

It was meant to transform the way that we deal with waste.

Australians were told to sort through their bins, and take plastic bags and packaging to to the country’s biggest supermarkets to have them recycled.

But instead, tonnes of this plastic was shoved into storage. Now, authorities are still trying to track it all down. So how did it all go so wrong?

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on the impossible promise of REDcycle, and what we do with over ten thousand tonnes of plastic that has nowhere to go.

It’s Monday April 17.

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RUBY:

So, Mike, the company that had these big ambitions to be Australia's biggest soft plastics recycling scheme has now collapsed. And we're learning more about what actually went on behind the scenes and led up to this moment. But before we get to what it was that went wrong, can you take me through what the scheme actually promised and how people were asked to recycle?

MIKE:

Sure. Well, the company was called REDcycle, and people might be familiar with its bins through seeing them at their local supermarkets because they were partnered with Coles and Woolworths. And so these chains encouraged customers to sort their own soft plastics, which could then be turned over to REDcycle. So you would take them down to your supermarket and you would stick them in the REDcycle bin. And we were led to believe that they would then be taken away for recycling. So, you know, all over the country, thousands of Australians were diligently separating their waste and delivering it to the bins. But instead, Ruby, what we know today is that things weren't going at all well. And today, environmental authorities and REDcycle’s creditors are still discovering big caches of plastics all around the country where they've been stockpiled instead of being recycled. So what we know is that there's around 11,000 tonnes, in total, of plastic that REDcycle was meant to have saved from landfills. I suppose it has been saved from landfills because it's not there, but it is instead piled up in, the latest count is 44 different locations around Australia. And REDcycle itself is under administration, having racked up debts reportedly totalling something like $5 million.

RUBY:

Right. Okay. So people were told that they're soft plastics, so we're talking about things like bags and packaging and plastic wraps, that kind of thing, that that would be recycled if they put it in these depots. But that wasn't what was actually happening. Instead, it was all just kind of going to these storage spots in locations around the country. So why wasn't REDcycle closing the loop here on what they promised? What was going wrong?

MIKE:

Well, we're still getting to the bottom of that. The REDcycle version, the version from the founder, Liz Kasell, is that things just got out of hand, essentially. On the one hand, REDcycle was getting more and more single use plastics in their bins. On the other hand, demand for the material that they were providing to the recyclers fell.

So the longer history of this is that back when the founder, Liz Kasell, started REDcycle about 12 years ago, the big supermarket chains were beginning to come under enormous pressure for their wasteful use of plastics. You know, for the enormous amount of packaging that they seemed to stick on everything, frankly, and they were looking for a solution. And so when REDcycle came along, they saw this as an opportunity to get themselves a little environmental cred, and they saw it as a business opportunity.

Archival tape – Liz Kasell:

“My name is Liz Kasell, I’m the founder and CEO of REDcycle. REDcycle is a program that was started at my kitchen table over 11 years ago because I was a mum of a young son and I was really concerned about my plastic going to landfill. And I wanted to try and come up with a solution. I didn't have a recycling background. We've started this program just through innovation and partnering with Australian manufacturers. I didn't want to export our material.”

MIKE:

But the public's appetite for the change that Kasell was promising was greater than she could have imagined. And it was growing fast. Between 2019 and REDcycle’s collapse last November, collection volumes ballooned by 350%

Archival tape – Liz Kasell:

“We are experiencing a significant challenge in our REDcycle supply chain. It's only a temporary challenge, but it's a significant one and it's thanks to pandemic related stresses.”

MIKE:

Several of the actual processing plants that had contracted with REDcycle, to turn the waste into other products, they couldn't take the volumes. And other plants had setbacks. Their biggest customer actually caught on fire, and so it was out of operation. Bottom line, the plastic that REDcycle was collecting had nowhere to go, so they started stockpiling it, hoping to find a solution.

RUBY:

Okay, so these stockpiles of waste continue to grow, Mike, as the company tries and fails to find ways to get them processed. At what point, though, does it all get out of hand? When does REDcycle realise that it actually can't deliver on what it's promising? And at that point, do they do anything about it?

MIKE:

Well, I can't tell you exactly when they realised it was out of control. I presume they never did because in the end it was their creditors that shut the whole thing down. They didn't do it voluntarily. But you're quite right. They should have told someone about it. I spoke to the head of Australia's main Packaging Recycling association, Jeff Angel, and he says REDcycle just weren't being transparent about what was going on. They didn't tell anyone about the scale of their stockpiling and they should have. They should have told the various state environment protection agencies or they could have told their business partners, but they didn't. So as Angel says, they didn't tell anyone that they'd been stockpiling this stuff since 2018, so they'd been stockpiling it for a long time.

And more and more of these stockpiles are being found today. Of course, some of them present fire hazards. And REDcycle is now being prosecuted by various EPAs for their lack of disclosure. Their creditors are after them, they're in a lot of trouble. And as Angel says, you know, they've also irritated the public who thought they were trying to do the right thing, even though it was only a relatively small proportion of the population participating. They are, he says, a very vocal and angry group now.

RUBY:

And so, these stockpiles of plastics that are being discovered, whose responsibility are they now and what happens to them? Because the company is in liquidation and recycling plants can't take them. But you're saying that some of them could be serious hazards.

MIKE:

Yeah, that's right. One day before REDcycle was put into liquidation, the supermarkets, the people that that REDcycle had the deals with were left with really no option but to take responsibility for the plastics. According to Coles and Woolworths, when REDcycle initially suspended operations back in last November, it didn't actually tell them the specific locations of its stockpiles or how big they were. A spokesperson on behalf of Coles and Woolworths says that, to date, they've identified 44 sites and that REDcycle had been stockpiling these soft plastics, and this is the key bit, without our knowledge.

So these sites were scattered across six states. There were 19 in New South Wales, 15 in Victoria, six in South Australia, two in Tasmania and one each in Western Australia and Queensland. So they're all over the place. And this is a problem that's coming home to roost, I think you would say, for the supermarkets, because there's no easy solution for them. To take a hard view of it, the supermarkets sought to greenwash themselves for their profligate packaging practices and those of their suppliers by partnering with REDcycle.

It seemed like a simple solution and pretty clearly they didn't ask many questions and that's why they didn't know what was being done with their waste. So today the environmental agencies are on their backs to find a safer way of dealing with all this plastic. So if Coles, Woolworths, etc., dump it now or, you know, worse, burn it, they stand to lose whatever environmental credibility they gained from the whole scheme in the first place.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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Archival tape – News Anchor 1:

“An EPA probe into a recycling mess has found half a billion plastic shopping bags sitting in Melbourne warehouses.”

Archival tape – News Anchor 2:

“Australia's largest soft plastics recycling program, REDcycle, has been suspended due to untenable pressure on its business model.”

Archival tape – News Anchor 3:

“It should be getting broken down, recycled in a soft plastics plant. But the main one in Melbourne burnt down and the company behind the supermarket scheme has now collapsed.“

RUBY:

So, Mike, as I understand it, Australian supermarkets were using this scheme, REDcycle, to encourage their customers to recycle their soft plastics. And essentially what they're doing there is they're making a pact with consumers. Now that the scheme has collapsed. to what extent should those supermarket chains bear the responsibility of trying to fix this problem, seeing as what they were doing was essentially a partnership between them and REDcycle?

MIKE:

Well, certainly Jeff Angel and the recycling group see it as being very much the responsibility of the supermarkets to fix the problem. They were using REDcycle to enhance their reputations. So really, there's an onus on them to have understood what was going on. And I should tell you here, it wasn't just the supermarkets. The REDcycle website lists a couple of hundred businesses; retailers, food and wine companies, packaging companies, pharmaceutical companies, apparel and appliance makers and sellers, even Australia Post, are all listed as partners. You know, there were a lot of people trying to, sort of, bathe in the reflected green glow of this recycling outfit. But it was the supermarkets, of course, who directly engaged the public in the recycling effort, and they're the ones most culpable. They are now part of something called a Soft Plastics Taskforce, Coles, Woolies, and Aldi, with the Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, and occasionally involving other people as well, that is trying to find a solution. It began meeting last December after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission gave a quote, interim authorisation, unquote for Coles, Woolies and Aldi to work together for a limited time. To quote the ACCC press release, for the particular purpose of exploring options for the storage, transport, processing, recycling and management of soft plastics to minimise the volume that may end up in landfill, which is of great benefit to us all. So in other words, the normal rules that apply to competition between these big retailers were suspended so they could cooperate to try and fix this problem. And they're supposed to report back with solutions for consumers in the future.

RUBY:

Okay. But if what caused REDcycle to collapse was the fact that recycling plants in Australia just don't have the capacity to accept the volume of demand of soft plastics. If we're not actually really set up to properly recycle, even if consumers are doing the right thing, then surely the fix is easier said than done. I mean, can supermarkets even restart some kind of scheme unless they themselves build that recycling capacity?

MIKE:

Well, you put your finger right on the problem here. You know that the same problem that caused REDcycle to fall over is now being confronted by the supermarkets. This taskforce that's been established thinks that they may be able to get things happening again, that possibly recycling could start again in the supermarkets by 2025. But it cautions, in its roadmap that it set out, I'm quoting them here, the timeline to resume collections may be affected by the need to dedicate local processing capacity to the existing stockpiles. So in other words, they've got to deal with this enormous amount of stuff they've already got before they can start dealing with anything new.

This, I might add. REDcycle was collecting less than 5% of the total post-consumer soft plastics. So even that was too much for the system to handle. Heaven only knows how they're going to expand it to deal with the ever growing amount of plastic waste into the future. Any solution here would be a massive undertaking, I guess, is the bottom line. One option that's being considered by the supermarkets, of course, is sending this waste overseas for reprocessing, which of course would be consistent with Australia's historical approach to dealing with waste. Pack it up and don't often make it someone else's problem. Until about six years ago, for example, we used to send something like 600,000 tonnes of waste, not just plastics, but, you know, all manner of allegedly recyclable material, to China. And then China effectively banned it on the basis that it was contaminated with food and other things that made it uneconomic for them to deal with. And then a number of other Southeast Asian neighbours followed suit. Ball back in our court, problem back in our laps.

The problem is huge. This was shown very clearly in data that was pulled together for something called the National Plastics Summit, which led to a subsequent national plastics plan under the former Morrison government back in 2021. And what that found was that Australia consumes 3.5 million tonnes of plastics. They actually itemised that, 70 billion pieces of what it called scrunchable plastics every year. And around 84% of all those plastics go into landfills. Another 130,000 tonnes a year, it said, went into the marine environment. And of the much smaller volume, almost 400,000 tonnes of plastics that were actually collected and reprocessed, almost all of that was still exported. So a big problem. And furthermore, it's getting worse.

According to the New South Wales EPA at the end of last year, the total amount of plastic packaging consumed went up more than 5% in the two years to 2019/20. And the amount recovered went down from 18% to 16%, which is pretty woeful.

So things are not moving in the right direction.

RUBY:

And when you think about the promise of the scheme that led to all of this. I mean, it was basically asking consumers to play their part and to trust that if they did the right thing, then the recycling industry would take care of the rest. But the picture that you're painting is that the industry, at the moment, is essentially incapable of dealing with the problem. So does the solution then have to involve transforming the entire production process instead of asking consumers to do more?

MIKE:

Well, yes, ultimately it should. I mean, ultimately, it would be a very good thing. For example, if we could put all our soft plastics in our recycling bins, along with the hard plastics that do get recycled at greater rates. But to your broader point, yes, it's a huge problem. And one solution, which unfortunately appears to be increasingly resorted to, is just burning it. The incinerating of plastics is a big business. There was a recent report from a group called Energy Tracker Asia, which drew on research from concerned groups around the world, to show in considerable detail what the global picture is. What it showed was that in the European Union and the United States, they already burn around 42% and 12% of their waste, respectively. So it's a huge amount. And they foreshadowed that the waste to energy sector, as it calls itself, will grow massively in the coming years. In China alone, there's something like 300 different incineration plants and more growing. So plastic, of course, is a product of the fossil fuel industry and that industry sees opportunity in this. You know, they can produce more and then just burn it. And when they burn it, they can generate energy from it, just like you do from burning other fossil fuel products. As the energy report noted that some of the biggest petrochemical and consumer goods companies in the world, including Exxon, Dow, Total, Shell, Chevron, Phillips, BASF, PepsiCo, Procter and Gamble, were all involved in an organisation called the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, and it had committed to spending $1.5 billion US over five years to finding solutions, one of which, of course, is incineration. I might add that we do incinerate a relatively small amount in this country, but that's not circular economy, it's not recycling. It adds greenhouse gases and adds to our environmental problem. So, you know, in solving one problem, we just exacerbate another. But the Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, points to a number of initiatives. You know, they're investing $250 million in recycling facilities, including 60 million towards, you know, hard to recycle plastics, and they're planning to reform the regulation of packaging by 2025.

Overall, it's not a very happy picture, I've got to say. But I would like to finish on a slightly positive note, and that is this; the recycling company that took the biggest share of REDcycle materials, the one that caught fire back in the middle of last year, is about to start operations again and it's going to be producing four times as much recycled material as it did before the fire. The main thing it produces is something called TonerPlas, which mixes old toner cartridges, all sorts of soft plastics, doesn't matter if they're contaminated with food waste. And it makes a material that can be mixed with asphalt for roads. The point here is that there are uses for this stuff. It appears that it now has some economic value, and that's a very important thing. So, you know, there is some hope for the future. At the very least. Ruby, you can start hanging on to your plastic bags because you only have to wait about two years and it might well be you'll be able to take them back to the supermarkets again.

RUBY:

The stockpile will just be at my house.

MIKE:

Yeah, that's right. And mine.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Homes of Liberal Party politicians have been raided by the New South Wales’ independent commission against corruption.

Reports suggest that the raids relate to allegations made last year in parliament by a Liberal member, that senior colleagues were paid to install councillors on the Hills Shire Council, who would be friendly to a Sydney developer.

And,

Rivalry between Sudan’s military forces broke into fierce gun battles in the country over the weekend.

At least 25 people were killed and over 100 injured as troops from the Sudanese armed forces and the country’s Rapid Support Force fought over the presidential palace and an airport.

The fighting threatens to plunge Sudan back into conflict and destabilise neighbouring countries.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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