ACCC gives OK to collaborate over soft plastics – Australia
Posted on November 29, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingMajor supermarket retailers will form part of a Soft Plastics Taskforce to explore solutions to address the immediate effects of REDcycle suspending its return-to-store soft plastics recovery program, following a conditional ACCC interim authorisation.
Coles, Woolworths and ALDI lodged an urgent application for interim authorisation last week.
“We have moved quickly to approve the interim application as the suspension of the REDcycle program stopped in-store collections of soft plastic, raising community concerns and an urgent need to address the environmental risk of the existing stockpile and future waste,” ACCC Deputy Chair Mick Keogh said.
Under the ACCC’s conditional interim authorisation, the authorised supermarkets can engage in meetings of the Soft Plastics Taskforce, which will consider, and seek to develop and implement, a short-term solution for the storage, transportation, processing, recycling and/or management of soft plastics.

How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter?
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