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South Australia’s environment authority said on Friday it had discovered about 1,500 tonnes of REDcycle soft plastics at two warehouses in Adelaide.
The REDcycle scheme collapsed in November following revelations by The Age that hundreds of millions of bags and other soft plastic items left by customers at Coles and Woolworths were being secretly stored in warehouses and not being recycled.
REDcycle told EPA Victoria about several sites after it was issued with an information collection notice. Others were revealed by logistics companies. The Victorian EPA said on Friday it believed more stocks could exist in Australia.
EPA Victoria chief executive Lee Miezis said it was an offense to mislead the body and REDcycle could face repercussions if it misled investigators or failed to provide information relevant to investigations.
REDcycle said in a statement Friday that it was assisting with the investigation and would continue to fully support the EPA’s work.
“We continue to keep our partners and our dedicated and loyal REDcycle community updated with our progress,” the company said. “Our top priority is working to find solutions to turn this material into a desirable and necessary resource for the greater good.”
EPA inspectors at one of Melbourne’s warehouses. Credit: EPA
Miezis said the agency was working to make sure fire risk mitigation was in place at all sites.
“Our officers are inspecting the sites today and we will continue to work hard, using our strongest regulatory powers, until we are confident we have found all the sites in Victoria,” he said.
“We will not allow unacceptable risks to Victoria’s community or environment from pollution or waste.
“While REDcycle operators told us about some of the sites, intelligence from logistics companies and others is assisting EPA’s investigations. If you have any of this soft plastic waste in your warehouse, we need to know.”
Miezis said about half a million plastic bags had been discovered, which could now end up in a landfill.
“We’d like to see them recycled as planned, but if we have to take them off site to manage the risk and they have to go to landfill, obviously we’ll work with the site managers, we’ll work with the landfill operators to ensure they are disposed of properly and safely,” he said.
REDcycle, a Melbourne-based company, claimed it collected up to 5 million plastic items a day from public drop-off points at nearly 2,000 supermarkets across the country and delivered them to other companies, where used as ingredients in concrete and asphalt. , street furniture, bollards and shopping carts.
However, instead of taking plastic to businesses to make other items as promised, REDcycle was transporting the plastic to warehouses for long-term storage in what some experts saw as a potential risk to the environment environment and fire safety.
The company did not publicly announce the suspension of the recycling component of its program and for months had continued to collect large volumes of soft plastics such as shopping bags, pet food bags, ice cream wrappers, bubble wrap and frozen food containers.
A spokeswoman for REDcycle told The Age last month that “a number of unforeseen challenges, exacerbated by the pandemic” had led to three companies that normally accepted plastic for recycling no longer doing so.
REDcycle had become almost entirely dependent on a single recycling operator, Close the Loop, to process its stock as the industry found it increasingly difficult to find financially viable methods of turning soft plastic into usable materials.
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The program’s collapse was set in motion in June, when a fire at a Melbourne factory Close the Loop destroyed the Australian waste industry’s ability to recycle soft plastics.
The blaze took more than 50 firefighters about five hours to bring under control, and forced the closure of the Hume Freeway in both directions.
The supermarket giant Coles said in a statement that it had been made aware of the warehouses where soft plastics collected through the program were being stored and was working with the authorities to find solutions.
“We are focused on working with government and other industry stakeholders to identify short-term solutions to enable Australians to get back to recycling the soft plastics in their household.”
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A spokesman for Aldi said they did not offer a national soft plastics recycling program and had paused a program being trialled in 12 of its stores.
“We will continue to explore alternative solutions for the recycling of soft plastics,” they said.
South Australia’s EPA said on Friday it was working with industry to determine whether more storage facilities were available.
Recycling is considered a high fire risk activity due to the highly flammable nature of plastic, paper and cardboard and the presence of flammable contaminants in recyclable steel and glass stocks.
Soft consumer plastics are one of the most difficult materials to recycle because they are often contaminated and often made from different types of plastics that are not easily processed.
REDcycle and Woolworths have been contacted for further comment.
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