The new Soft Plastic Processed Engineered Commodity (SPEC) facility on the New South Wales Mid North Coast can turn up to 14,000 tonnes a year of household soft plastics into pellets and flakes, which can then be used to create new plastic products.<\/p>\n
The plant has been processing tens of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste left over from the collapse of REDcycle.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Soft plastics are collected for processing at a facility in Kundle Kundle. (ABC News: Emma Siossian)<\/p>\n
iQRenew chief executive Danny Gallagher, whose company owns the plant, said it had allowed the centre to test its capacity.<\/p>\n
“This facility has processed all of the REDcycle material that was in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia,” Mr Gallagher said.<\/p>\n
“It gave us good feedstock and a good volume of material to really refine our processes here.”<\/p>\n
The plant will process soft plastics from in-store collection points once they are reintroduced at supermarkets across the country, as well as through council bin collection programs.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Danny Gallagher hopes the facility will boost Australia’s soft plastic recycling capabilities. (ABC Mid North Coast: Emma Siossian)<\/p>\n
Mr Gallagher said the plant could sort one type of soft plastic from another, which was previously the “missing piece” in soft plastics recycling.<\/p>\n
“What we’ve been able to design is equipment that separates the bread bag from the chip wrapper, so those two products can go on to be recycled in new, different products,” Mr Gallagher said.<\/p>\n
“This is the only facility of its type in the Southern Hemisphere that’s able to sort household soft plastics.”<\/p>\n
The facility can process plastic bags, food wrappers and packaging. (Supplied: iQRenew)<\/p>\n
However, Mr Gallagher said the facility’s success would depend on whether there was enough supply of soft plastics and users of the recycled product.<\/p>\n
“Building this piece of infrastructure is half the solution, the other half is the community reaching out to their councillors [and stakeholders] saying, ‘We want you to buy products that contain recycled content,'” he said.<\/p>\n
End product uptake is a key priority of Soft Plastics Stewardship Australia (SPSA), a not-for-profit organisation made up of 45 major brands and retailers with the goal of increasing soft plastics recycling.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Barry Cosier says uptake of the facility’s end product is vital to its success. (ABC Mid North Coast: Emma Siossian)<\/p>\n
“This is the chicken and egg scenario, so to up the recycling rate, we now have the recycler, but they need people to buy their material,” said SPSA co-CEO Barry Cosier.<\/p>\n
iQRenew this week received about $9.1 million in state and federal funding to expand the facility’s recycling capabilities to up to 24,000 tonnes of soft plastics a year.<\/p>\n
Important link in the chain<\/p>\n
One of the facility’s capabilities is preparing old plastic packaging for a more advanced type of chemical recycling, called hydrothermal liquefaction, which involves converting plastic back into oil.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The facility can sort various types of household soft plastics. (ABC Mid North Coast: Emma Siossian)<\/p>\n
The oil product can then be turned back into food-grade soft plastics.<\/p>\n
It is being trialled by Licella at Somersby, on the NSW Central Coast, with the aim of launching a full-scale plastic recycling facility in Victoria from next year.<\/p>\n
“This facility essentially enables us to sort and deconstruct household soft plastics \u2026 and we can then provide that feedstock to companies like Licella,” Mr Gallagher said.<\/p>\n
“In the near future, we are hopeful that, here in Australia, a bread bag sorted here at this facility, processed through chemical recycling, can become another bread bag. That’s true circularity.”<\/p>\n
Licella general manager of stakeholder engagement Andrea Polson said soft plastic processing facilities played a crucial role.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The hydrothermal liquefaction plant at Somersby converts soft plastics into oil. (Supplied: Licella)<\/p>\n
“We’re starting to link up collection and processing, and that’s really one of the big enablers of building these advanced recycling facilities here in Australia,” she said.<\/p>\n
Ms Polson said while soft plastics were a focus for advanced recycling, a lot of other plastic items had the potential to be kept out of landfill, including plastics used in agriculture and manufacturing.<\/p>\n
She said the technology would complement plastic recycling that was already in place.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alexandra Geddes says the facility is an important step in creating a circular recycling economy. (ABC Mid North Coast: Emma Siossian)<\/p>\n
The NSW Environment Protection Authority said the SPEC facility was a good step towards addressing the 890,000 tonnes of plastic waste produced by the state each year, only 14 per cent of which was recycled.<\/p>\n
“We’re running out of landfill capacity in Greater Sydney by 2030,” NSW EPA executive director programs and innovation Alexandra Geddes said.<\/p>\n
“The more that we can do to maintain and promote a circular economy, keep things in use longer, [that] really is the most important thing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is hope Australians will again be able to recycle their soft plastics after the opening of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99,73190,73187,73189,73188,73191,73185,73186,102],"class_list":["post-100629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-can-i-recycle-soft-plastics","tag-household-plastics-recycling","tag-recycling-technology","tag-redcycle-program","tag-redcycle-replacement","tag-soft-plastics-recycling","tag-taree-iqrenew","tag-woolworths"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}