New report suggests phasing out ‘problematic plastics’ to tackle recycling crisis

Australia needs a “comprehensive and consistent” system to recycle plastics, experts have warned.

In a new report, experts say Australia needs to invest in its processing industry or phase out “problematic plastics”.

Peter Allan, Director of Sustainable Resource Use, and the lead author of the report, told Tom Elliott plastics have different properties.

“It comes down to creating collecting systems and sorting the different plastics because each of them have different properties they have to be handled differently,” he said.

“You should be able to in a convenient way have a consistent system across all households in the country where all plastics in the market go back into recycling.

“What we need to do is control the input – make sure we have some of the problematic plastics taken out of our packaging so we are only using two or three plastics.

“At the moment, soft plastics make up about one third of the packaging we use in this country and yet we don’t have really comprehensive systems for those, and we need to.”

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Image: KONTROLAB / Contributor