Australia’s Unpackit Awards, an annual competition to determine the nation’s best and worst packaging, has given the unenviable “Worst Packaging” prize to recently popularised plastic coffee cans.
In an event brought over from New Zealand, and run by the Australian Marine Conservation Society, the Plastic Free Foundation, and WWF Australia, the award sees hundreds of nominations assessed by packaging, plastics, waste, and pollution experts for the respective best and worst categories.
The winner, or loser, of the “Worst” award came after “no shortage of problematic packaging”, according to Unpackit. But the cans in question were chosen for the award be cause it represents “everything that’s problematic with packaging in Australia”.
“They’re single-use and built for on-the-go consumption, making them high-risk for littering,” Unpackit added. “They combine plastic and metal in a way that makes them unrecyclable and are also excluded from container deposit schemes, meaning there’s nowhere obvious to put them when you’re done and no financial incentive to return them.”
At the same time, Unpackit claimed that they were “unnecessary” additions to cafes.
“Mixed-material packaging contaminates every stream it touches in our yellow bins and ends up as waste anyway,” Suzanne Toumbourou, CEO of the Australian Council of Recycling, added.
“To genuinely reduce waste and improve resource efficiency, packaging must prioritise material reduction, maximise reuse, and be designed for recyclability so recycling can operate as a true remanufacturing supply chain.”