The voluntary administration of Recycling Plastics Australia has rightly intensified calls for national packaging reform.
Recent reporting in PKN has documented the jobs, government investment and recycling capacity now at risk. But beyond the immediate circumstances of the company, there is a deeper lesson Australia needs to confront.
Our packaging problem is not simply a shortage of recycling technology. It is our failure to build complete recovery systems around that technology.
For too long, policy has focused on whether packaging is theoretically capable of being recycled. Far less attention has been paid to whether it is actually collected, sorted and processed – and whether there is a viable market for the resulting material.
Australia’s national target called for 70 per cent of plastic packaging to be recycled or composted by 2025. APCO’s 2023–24 data puts the rate at just 20 per cent. This is not a small gap or a near miss. It is evidence that voluntary commitments and design claims have failed to translate into recovery at scale.
We have confused recyclable with recycled for too long.
Building processing capacity is essential, but a recycling facility cannot survive on technology and good intentions. It needs a reliable supply of suitable material, customers prepared to buy its output and the ability to compete with cheap virgin plastic and imported recycled resin. It also needs sufficient certainty to justify long-term investment.
Government grants can help construct facilities, but they cannot create this entire system on their own.
Australia needs a mandatory, nationally harmonised extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging. However, introducing EPR is only part of the answer. Its design will determine whether it creates genuine circularity or simply gives us a more elaborate system for measuring failure.
Businesses placing packaging on the market should contribute to the cost of managing it after use. Those funds should be transparently reinvested in collection, sorting, recycling, composting and reuse systems, as well as the development of reliable end markets.
Crucially, fees and incentives must be based on verified outcomes rather than broad material classifications.
Packaging should not receive favourable treatment merely because it contains recycled content or can be described as technically recyclable. Those attributes may be beneficial, but they do not tell us what will happen to the product after use.
Consider a single-use takeaway cup made with recycled PET. Using recycled plastic may reduce demand for virgin resin during its initial manufacture. But if the cup is consumed away from home, contaminated with food or drink, placed in general waste and sent to landfill, it has not become circular.
A recycled-content product without a realistic pathway back into recovery remains a disposable product.
This is particularly important for foodservice packaging.
Takeaway cups, containers, trays, lids and cutlery are commonly used away from home. They may be discarded in shopping centres, workplaces, hospitals, schools, stadiums, airports or public spaces. They are frequently mixed with food and liquids, and many never encounter a recycling collection system.
Applying the same assessment used for clean household packaging can therefore produce misleading results. A foodservice item may perform well in a laboratory or packaging design assessment while having almost no prospect of recovery under real operating conditions.
Regulation requiring single-use foodservice packaging to be recyclable or contain recycled plastic could unintentionally lock in more disposable plastic. If the collection and processing system does not exist, the policy may simply replace one landfill-bound item with another while allowing it to carry a stronger environmental claim.
This does not mean recycled content has no value. It means recycled-content requirements should be applied where collection, reprocessing and end markets are credible. They should not substitute for establishing what actually happens to a product after use.
Foodservice packaging should be recognised as a distinct category within any future EPR scheme. Its fees and recovery requirements should reflect where it is used, the likelihood of contamination, available collection systems, processor acceptance and its verified fate after disposal.
Australia also needs better evidence about these material flows and outcomes. Before setting incentives, we must understand how much foodservice packaging is placed on the market, where it is consumed, how it is discarded, which facilities receive it and how much is ultimately recovered.
Without that evidence, eco-modulated fees risk rewarding theoretical design characteristics rather than real environmental performance.
At BioPak, we do not believe there is one material that can solve every packaging problem.
The hierarchy begins with eliminating unnecessary packaging. Reuse should be expanded where an effective return and washing system can be maintained. Clean fibre and plastics should be recycled where collection, processing and end markets exist. Certified compostable packaging has a role in appropriate food-soiled applications where it can be collected with food waste and accepted by suitable organics facilities.
Policy should begin with the outcome we want and work backwards. It should not select a preferred material first and assume the necessary recovery infrastructure will somehow follow.
Consumers remain important, but they cannot recycle their way around missing infrastructure, inconsistent bins, confusing labels and non-existent end markets. Responsibility must sit with producers, regulators and the wider packaging supply chain.
Recycling Plastics Australia’s administration is a warning about what happens when one part of the system is developed without sufficient support from the others. But the answer must be more sophisticated than simply calling for more recycling capacity or another recycled-content target.
Australia needs national regulation that holds producers accountable, funds complete recovery systems and measures success according to what is actually recovered.
If we continue rewarding packaging for what it could become rather than accounting for where it really ends up, we will continue mistaking circular ambition for circularity.
