Packaging industry calls for fourth household bin to boost recycling

3 months ago 21

Households should get a fourth kerbside bin dedicated to glass recycling, the packaging industry has told Environment Minister Murray Watt, in a call for the rest of Australia to follow Victoria’s lead in introducing a purple-lidded bin.

The attendees at a recycling table co-hosted by Visy chairman Anthony Pratt and Nine Publishing also called for a nationally consistent container-recycling scheme that takes wine and spirit bottles and food-grade containers.

Visy chairman Anthony Pratt greets Unilever chief Nick Bangs at the 2025 Recycling Roundtable.

Visy chief executive Mark De Wit said the purple bin dedicated to glass recycling should be adopted nationally, especially in metropolitan areas. Best known as a packaging giant, Visy is also a major recycling company that processes nearly 60 per cent of all kerbside collections.

Australia is now fully covered by container deposit schemes for beverage cans and bottles, and this has increased recycling and reduced litter. However, De Wit said 40 per cent of glass was still recycled through households’ kerbside bins, even in states where the container scheme accepted wine and spirit bottles.

That posed a problem, De Wit said, because packaging manufacturers had made their materials lighter, so a beer bottle today weighed much less than 20 years ago.

“It uses less natural resources and less energy but it has a far greater propensity to break,” De Wit said.

“You throw it in your recycling bin, it goes in the back of a truck, it bounces all its way to a [material recovery facility], it gets pushed by a front-end loader onto conveyor belts, and it is smashed to smithereens by the time it goes through all that.”

Glass, unlike plastic or paper, can be recycled repeatedly without losing any properties, making the material particularly valuable. De Wit said the average glass bottle now had 64 per cent recycled content, up from 30 per cent five years ago.

A bottle of beer weighs less than 20 years ago because manufacturers were using less glass.

However, the result of the breakages meant that half of the glass collected in kerbside bins was lost and unable to be recycled.

The second problem was that shards of broken glass became embedded in cardboard and paper, and were then sent to the mill for paper recycling where fragments would wind up being ground up, like “pouring sand” in the machinery. De Wit said on average, for every tonne of paper going into a paper mill from a material recycling facility, 20 kilograms or 2 per cent was glass.

The Victorian government started rolling out purple-lidded kerbside bins for glass recycling several years ago, and it is slated to be standard across the state in 2027. However, about 30 councils have called for the state government to ditch purple bins and expand the container deposit scheme instead, citing cost and the issue of where residents would keep the fourth bin.

The National Kerbside Collections Roadmap does not state whether there should be a dedicated glass recycling bin but specifies that the colour should be purple, along with red for landfill, yellow for mixed recycling, and green for food and garden organic waste.

Visy chief Mark De Wit and Asahi group chief Amanda Sellers at the 2025 Recycling Roundtable.

De Wit also called for the eight different container deposit schemes around Australia to have the same rules, a point made by several attendees, which included some of Australia’s biggest consumer companies: Arnott’s Biscuits, the Kraft Heinz Company, Lion, PepsiCo, Nestle and Unilever.

Asahi group chief executive Amanda Sellers said it was important to increase the number of return points to make it more convenient, and to expand the scheme to include wine and spirits bottles and food-grade packaging.

“Every scheme is different, and that does present some challenges for large and small business alike,” Sellers said.

Lisa Rippon-Lee, vice president of public affairs, communications and sustainability for Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, said harmonisation was critical given there were eight schemes and six portals.

Environment Minister Murray Watt at the 2025 Recycling Roundtable.

“We have 800 to 900 barcodes in Queensland and they all have to be registered through the portal, and that happens six times,” Rippon-Lee said. “The administrative burden of working with all of those schemes is huge.”

Rippon-Lee said improving collection rates would bring down the cost of recycled plastic, which was currently more expensive than virgin plastic.

Watt said he would work with the states and territories but could not “bully or cajole” them.

“It’s one of the joys of the federation, and there are some states that are further ahead than others in different parts, but there is a role for the federal government to play that national leadership role,” Watt said.

He said he would be interested to know whether the industry agreed with the kerbside collection road map, which was agreed between the federal, state and territorial governments last year.

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