Have you recently dropped off soft plastics for recycling at a Coles, Woolworths or Aldi?
The ACCC recently gave these supermarkets the green light to keep collaborating on a pilot program to collect soft plastics for recycling in some stores.
The ACCC says 43 Coles, Woolworths and Aldi stores across NSW and VIC are currently collecting soft plastics.
Have you seen this in your local store and used it? Or have you found another way to recycle soft plastics that you think others should know about?
Tamworth Woolies still has a sign at the front counter saying they are currently not accepting soft plastics for recycling.
We are stuffing ours into bread bags and storing, but unless something happens soon, we’ll have to take them to the tip on our ~6 monthly visit.
Our local Kingston (Vic) council has kept plastic recycling going with collection points at local community centres. We fill a large plastic bag and drop it in regularly with our 10c cans and bottles which the Kinder benefits from.
RecycleSmart (www.recyclesmart.com) takes soft plastic, but you have to pay them to pick it up. It costs around $7.50 per shopping bag full. They take lots of other things as well, including a lot of hard to recycle stuff that councils don’t normally take. I’ve used them (especially when supermarkets stopped taking soft plastic) and have been very happy with their service. If supermarkets are taking soft plastic again I’ll go back there as it doesn’t cost me anything. But for all the other tricky stuff I’ll keep using RecycleSmart.
@ Rog. This is about SOFT plastics (ie single use shopping bags and similar - basically any plastic that can be crushed). Nothing to do with cans and bottles.
I believe that @Rog was referring to the situation that their Council collects the soft plastics at the same place they collect the cans and bottles. So not a large plastic bag of cans and bottles but a large plastic bag of soft plastics, when and where they also drop off their cans and bottles.
I’ve noticed a sign up in Woolworths saying a trial is underway in some stores. I’m in Tasmania so obviously no collections happening here. We don’t even have the 10c return scheme yet, this has annoyed a lot of Tasmanias as we were meant to have it 2 yrs ago.
I contacted a big company early last year who collect and recycle industrial plastics. Whilst they do not have the capacity to recycle household soft plastics they did say they were looking at it.
I read somewhere that in Europe they successfully recycle soft plastics.
Recycling is an issue in Australia, the number of times I see the wrong things put in recycling bins. If we had to recycle things separately e.g. bottles in one crate, cardboard in another it would ensure that the correct things are recycled.
Thanks, Samstev. We use this service too and are extremely happy with it. Mainly use it for soft plastics, but also for foil pill packaging and occasionally for batteries.
On the Central Coast we have Curby, a soft plastics recycling initiative https://www.curbyit.com/about-us/
It is currently available here, and in Newcastle and Tamworth council areas.
I like the consumer-friendly collection approach: put soft plastics into a special “Curby bag”, close it tightly and stick a special tag on it, and put it in the yellow mixed-recycling bin.
Only if your council is participating in the Curby process, of course.
According to the Curby website, those in the Tamworth Regional Council area need to deposit the Curby bags at the council building (35km away for us). However, the TRC website says to put them in the yellow lid recyclables bin, which we don’t have out here.
A few were set up to recycle soft plastics and they were operational for a number of months.
I was taking mine to Coles at Moonee Ponds Central Victoria, until October, however, they stop this since.
To my knowledge they have stop recycling.
We have nowhere to go.
We’re very lucky - there’s not one but TWO Woolworths in our suburb (Ashfield, Sydney) accepting soft plastic recycling!
We had been using RecycleSmart for a while - our local council (Inner West Council) partnered with them and initially they offered free/very cheap pickups for all sorts of recycling, but the price has crept up and now it’s $7.50 a bag, as someone said above. Very happy to have a free option again!
@Alice & Sifra. Colesworths stopped taking soft plastics because the company which was actually processing them stopped doing that and the soft plastics were simply building up in warehouses. They couldn’t even dispose of them overseas.
If any Colesworth stores are taking soft plastics now my thought is that they are only doing so for brownie points and I would seriously question where those soft plastics are ending up.
If anyone knows better I would love to hear it.
