Hundreds take part in soft plastics recycling trial
Published on 15 August 2024
Soft plastics are ‘flexible’ plastic packaging that can be easily scrunched in your hand, like bread bags, chip packets, bubble wrap, zip lock bags, which are not accepted in kerbside yellow-lid recycling bins.
Community members were encouraged to collect their clean and dry soft plastics during July and drop off them off for free at drop off sites located in Anglesea, Lorne, Torquay and Winchelsea over the first weekend in August.
“Soft plastics are one of the hardest types of waste for householders to deal with, so we decided to trial a once-off drop-off collection to help residents recycle them and to collect data to inform possible future programs”, Mayor Cr Liz Pattison said.
“We had a great response with hundreds of residents taking up the opportunity to recycle the soft plastics they’d been collecting. The total customers through the drop off sites for the trial period was 487, with 339 of them visiting the Torquay drop off site,” she said.
“A total of 1,328 bags full of soft plastic were deposited with bag sizes could varying from a bread bag up to a 25kg dog food bag.”
“The plastics will be baled and sent for processing in Melbourne to be converted into new soft plastics packaging and recycled road products.”
“We would be very keen to hear from the community about their experiences with this trial, and encourage people to complete our soft plastics collection trial survey to help with our evaluation.”
“We’re lucky to have an environmentally conscience community and it was great to see so many people getting involved in this circular economy initiative. We will continue to work closely with our community through implementing actions from our recently adopted Circular Economy Action Plan 2024-2027 to reduce waste going into landfill and increase resource recovery,” she said.
The soft plastics trial is now complete, and Council are evaluating the results. If you still have soft plastics and need to dispose of them, please put them in your red lid landfill bin, not in your yellow lid recycling bin.
Avoiding waste in the first place is always a better action than recycling waste, so residents are encouraged where possible to try to avoid soft plastics, for example, bring your own bags and containers to stores, avoid single-use plastic films, buy loose produce, and choose items with zero or minimal packaging.
To provide community feedback on the soft plastics collection trial please complete the survey at surfcoast.vic.gov.au/softplasticsurvey