The grocery aisle is a dizzying array of products wrapped in colourful packaging specifically designed to catch your eye and convince you to buy them.
But that packaging’s story doesn’t end once it’s been opened and — if recyclable — thrown into the recycling bin. An item isn’t truly “recycled” until it makes it back onto the grocery shelves as a new product or turned into something else.
So how much recyclable material ends up back in the supermarket as a new product?
According to the latest report by industry body Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO), the picture overall is pretty good. In 2022–23, packaging across all industries in Australia was, on average, made up of 44 per cent recycled content.
But this number obscures something. The recycled percentage varies wildly between different materials.
ABC Science took three packaging products that are common and relatively easy to recycle — glass bottles, aluminium cans and PET plastic bottles — to see just how much of each makes it through the system to begin a new life on supermarket shelves.
Aluminium cans
Made of aluminium with a polymer coating on the inside, cans — like those containing soft drink and beer — have long been considered a valuable commodity by the recycling industry.
That’s because aluminium can be recycled repeatedly without degrading. Around three quarters of the aluminium ever produced is still in circulation today.
But how much of a can sitting on an Australian supermarket shelf has been recycled? This changes depending on what can you buy.
A spokesperson from Coca-Cola Europacific Partners told the ABC that, on average, around two-thirds of the aluminium in its Australian cans had been recycled.
Another large packaging company in Australia called Orora said it had an even higher recycled content rate in their cans: 72 per cent.
While data on specific companies is nice, Ben Madden, a University of Technology Sydney researcher focusing on resource recovery systems, said that industry-wide data provides a clearer picture of the state of aluminium recycling in Australia.
For the industry overall, APCO noted in its report that aluminium packaging comprised, on average, 66 per cent recycled content.
If we compared this percentage to other countries, Dr Madden said Australia would sit “somewhere in the middle”, but it’s hard to get data on some countries such as the US.
While America does have a “recycling goal”, according to Dr Madden, data on recycled packaging across the industry is limited to a small number of members.
“The US is a bit of a black hole with information like that,” he said.
In Australia, once cans are dropped off at the 10-cent collection point, they’re separated, crushed, baled and sold to aluminium recyclers, according to Danielle Smalley, CEO at Exchange for Change, the company coordinating the NSW and ACT container deposit schemes.
But Australia doesn’t have the facilities to re-smelt aluminium, so our cans are sent overseas to places such as South Korea for processing.
“Once at an aluminium smelter, the bales of crushed cans are melted down and rolled into sheets of recycled aluminium,” Ms Smalley said.
About 20 per cent of aluminium in the sheets has been collected from recycling centres or 10-cent deposit schemes, (what’s known as post-consumer material), while 47 per cent comes from off-cuts or other aluminium that never made it out of the factory.
The sheets are sent back to Australia, where they’re “shaped into new products, like cans, ready to be filled and shipped to your local store and sold where the cycle starts again”.
Glass bottles
Glass is another highly recyclable material. Recycled glass is virtually identical to the new stuff — like aluminium, it doesn’t degrade even if it’s recycled hundreds of times.
In 2022–23, APCO reported the average amount of recycled content in glass packaging — which includes everything from jars to beer bottles — was 54 per cent.
This percentage is slowly increasing, particularly with more container deposit schemes separating glass from contaminants. The vast majority of glass recycling happens “post-consumer”, meaning it’s collected in 10-cent deposit schemes or from recycling bins.
But Dr Madden noted it was impossible to recycle 100 per cent of the glass in circulation into new packaging.
That’s because of contamination. Commingled recycling is a particular problem, because different coloured glass can break and mix together before it has been sorted.
“If your company makes flint glass, which is clear, and you’ve got one speck of green or amber [glass] in there … that makes it unsuitable [for recycling],” Dr Madden said.
If that was the case, the glass would be used in construction, or some other industry, instead of being made into packaging.
Plastic bottles
Over the years, packaging companies have moved away from aluminium and glass in their products.
Instead, most supermarket packaging uses some form of plastic.
It’s easy to see why. Plastic is lightweight and cheap, Dr Madden said.
But it’s much harder to recycle than aluminium and glass.
Complicating matters is the fact that plastic isn’t just one material. It encompasses wide variety of different materials, all with different levels of recyclability, from rigid high-density polyethylene (HDPE), down to polystyrene and soft plastics.
The plastic packaging type with by far the highest recycled content is polyethylene terephthalate (PET). It’s a hard plastic signified by the number “1” inside the triangle.
Once a PET bottle goes to a recycling plant, Exchange for Change’s Ms Smalley said, they’re “sorted, washed and shredded into flakes which is then turned into recycled PET resin, ready to be transformed into new beverage bottles and other food-grade packaging.
“The new bottles are filled, labelled and back on the shelf in store in as little as six weeks and the cycle begins again.”
In Australia, PET is used to make water and soft drink bottles.
In 2022–23, APCO reported that uncoloured clear PET packaging comprised, on average, 33 per cent recycled content. This is up from 14 per cent in 2018–19, and is likely to increase again in the next few years, with new PET recycling plants opening around Australia.
But there’s a problem with PET. While this type of plastic can be recycled multiple times in ideal conditions, it degrades over time.
The number of times PET can be recycled depends on how the plastic is treated as it goes through the recycling system. It’s harder to keep the plastic in good condition in the yellow bin because of contamination with other materials.
Container deposit schemes can help this, according to Exchange for Change’s Ms Smalley, as PET bottles collected this way have far less contamination than bottles collected through the yellow bin, and this can increase the life span of the plastic.
While recycled PET made up just a third of new packaging, this is still the most successful plastic in the recycling space. Other plastic types are even further behind.
Overall, plastic packaging is made up of just 10 per cent recycled content.
The hardest plastic to recycle are soft plastics. They’re made of a wide variety of plastic types which are hard to separate.
Soft plastics are still causing headaches for Coles and Woolworths more than two years after the REDcycle soft plastics recycling scheme collapsed.
Even if soft plastics are successfully collected and sorted, they are not turned into new soft plastic. Instead they are used as an additive for roads or made into benches, which has limited demand.
Packaging reforms and regulations
While there’s no doubt that packaging manufacturers are slowly getting better at using recycled materials, companies will still fall far short of the 2025 National Packaging Targets.
The target for the amount of plastic packaging being recycled or composed is 70 per cent. In 2022–23, the industry reached 19 per cent, which is a percentage point lower than the year before.
Experts agree these voluntary targets have not been particularly effective in spurring companies to take action, but Australia is now slowly moving in the right direction.
The 10-cent container deposit scheme is now available in every state but Tasmania, but that is launching midway through this year.
Some processing and recycling of glass and plastic is happening within Australia, but more will be required to ensure a steady supply of materials for new packaging.
Another step that is sorely needed, according to Dr Madden, is minimum packaging standard regulation, which companies have traditionally been very resistant to.
It’s much cheaper and easier for companies to make plastic from fossil fuels, for instance, than to find used plastic and turn it into new packaging.
“Unless [companies] are forced kicking and screaming, I don’t think that they’d implement anything,” Dr Madden said.
“It costs money to implement a circular economy.”
Public consultation closed late last year on Australia’s packaging regulations reform, with a spokesperson for the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water telling the ABC that the government will consider “a preferred regulatory option in 2025”.
For APCO CEO Chris Foley, the mandate will simplify recycling requirements for manufacturers by providing a comprehensive, nationwide set of standards.
“It’s clear business as usual isn’t going to be enough [to hit the National Packaging Targets], and change is necessary,” he said.
“The way the current system is built means that each state has its own packaging design standards and requirements and brands are having to navigate this.
“This is a breakthrough that will make it easier for brands to design their packaging for successful recovery and recycling.”