Soft Plastics Taskforce News Today

Supermarkets will ask customers to recycle scrunchable plastic food packaging for first time since REDcycle ended

From this week the remaining Australian stores will gradually run down their stock of the plastic bags with the Woolworths branded paper bags to become the new main option.

Supermarket giant Woolworths will start to phase out its 15c reusable plastic bags from its NSW, Victoria and Tasmania stores from Monday, in a bid to reduce plastic waste across the nation.

Woolworths will begin to phase out their 15c plastic shopping bags from stores in New South Wales, Victoria...

Large stockpiles of plastic waste have been discovered in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania.

Despite being paid $20million by the two supermarket giants to recycle plastic bags and other items for nearly a decade, REDcycle instead stored a mountain of waste at at least 44 sites.

Fourteen formerly secret stashes of plastic bags have been found around Australia following the collapse of REDcycle, the company that ran Coles and Woolworths’ signature soft plastic recycling program.

Coles and Woolworths say they will work to recycle as much of the material as possible, but still have the option of dumping stockpiles in landfill under certain conditions.

Until the program's demise, REDcycle had delivered the plastic to its partner recycling facilities to process into new recycled plastic products.