Nestlé and Australian recycler iQ Renew will collect soft plastics from more than 100,000 homes through kerbside recycling in a trial programme.
The trial, formally announced at the National Plastics Summit in Parliament House, aims to find a way to collect, sort, and process soft plastics that can be broadly adopted.
Sandra Martinez, CEO of Nestlé Australia, said Nestlé wanted to find sustainable paths to recycle packaging.
“While we are working to make all our packaging recyclable, we know that soft plastics is an area that needs greater focus and collaboration. We need to find ways to drive more recycling here,” she said.
“As Nestlé plans to reduce our virgin plastic use and increase the amount of food grade recycled plastic packaging we use, we need plastic to be collected. Given the low amount of soft plastic collected from consumers today, we hope this trial can unlock the significant potential for soft plastic packaging to become a resource.”
Martinez said Nestlé also wanted to help people to recycle effectively.
“Australians are enthusiastic recyclers and want better recycling systems that take plastic packaging out of landfill. This trial will uncover how households understand soft plastics collection and answer critical questions about how it affects their in-home recycling behaviour. We have a vision for Australia to have a waste free future.”
Sussan Ley, minister for the environment, said the pilot will support households in sorting soft plastics which are poorly sorted at present and which have significant recycling potential.
“The recycling economy starts here, this is where we take what are now seen as problems and turn them into assets that create remanufactured products, which create jobs and which grow our economy,” Ley said.
Danial Gallagher, CEO of iQ Renew, said there is an opportunity in turning soft plastic from a waste to a resource. Soft plastics not only make up 20 per cent of the volume of Australian household landfill bins but are also frequently found incorrectly placed in recycling bins.
“Most material recovery facilities (MRFs) can’t separate soft plastic from other items in household recycling, so while soft plastic can be recycled, what we lack is a robust, scalable system to collect and process it using existing kerbside collection,” Gallagher said.
“We’ve designed the trial so that at the front end, it will support householders to pre-sort their soft plastic and get it into a recycling stream, while behind the scenes, we’ll test using the sorted soft plastic as a resource in a range of different manufacturing processes.”
Nestlé and iQ Renew said the project will begin with a pilot of 2000 households, then will expand to more 100,000 households later in the year, processing around 750 tonnes of soft plastic that would otherwise be sent to landfill. Locations for the trial are currently under consideration.
