Australia missed every National Packaging Target in 2025. The headline figure, 44% average recycled content against a 50% goal, has been attributed to infrastructure gaps, consumer behaviour, and the complexity of packaging supply chains. These explanations are accurate but incomplete. They describe symptoms of a more fundamental problem: the market for recycled materials in Australia is structurally broken, and no amount of investment in collection or sorting infrastructure will fix a market that cannot signal quality. The recycling system’s core problem is not what goes in.
