The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has granted Coles, Woolworths and Aldi interim permission to proceed with their joint soft plastics recycling program.
The competition authority is allowing supermarkets to join forces through the Soft Plastics Taskforce, which was set up in November 2022 to address the fallout from the collapse of recycling group REDcycle.
REDcycle declared bankruptcy last year after failing to pay storage fees on thousands of tonnes of plastic, despite earning $20 million from a Coles and Woolworths scheme that ran over the previous decade.
Woolworths and Coles have said they will take responsibility for tonnes of soft plastic stored at sites across Australia.
The Soft Plastics Task Force was responsible for finding recycling service providers to process the soft plastic stockpiles that continued to be discovered across the country.
But so far, most of the stock has remained in warehouses as the task force registers providers to be part of the program.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission deputy chair Mick Keogh said recycling processors only joined the effort this year and had only just started processing stockpiles.
“It is important to keep stocks out of landfill and this temporary licence will enable supermarkets to process stocks with the necessary urgency, without any disruption,” Mr Keogh said.
The Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water estimates that Australians use 70 billion pieces of soft plastic each year.
About one million tonnes of Australia’s annual plastic consumption was single-use plastic, most of which ended up in landfill, and only 13 per cent of Australia’s single-use plastic consumption was recycled.
Mr Keogh said consumers wanted to see a return to in-store soft plastic collection and recycling on a wider scale and that the pilot in-store soft plastic collection point programme would continue to operate in 12 Melbourne supermarkets.
“We are keen to continue this pilot program with a sense of urgency and to enable future expansion of in-store collection operations,” he added.
Mr Keogh said that given the level of consumer concern, it was important that there was continued transparency about the progress supermarkets were making in addressing their soft plastic stocks.
“The ACCC’s expectation was that supermarkets would not prevent or restrict recycling processors from dealing with third parties in any long-term collection program,” he said.
“The ACCC recognises that any long-term solution, whether in the form of an industry-led management scheme or otherwise, is likely to be the subject of a separate licence application in the future.”
