A recent soft-plastic collection trial on the Surf Coast helped to reduce waste to landfill and maximise resource recovery.
Soft plastics are ‘flexible’ plastic packaging that can be easily scrunched in your hand, such as bread bags, chip packets, bubble wrap, ziplock bags, which are not accepted in kerbside yellow-lid recycling bins.
Community members were encouraged to collect their clean and dry soft plastics during July and drop them off for free at drop off sites located in Anglesea, Lorne, Torquay and Winchelsea over the first weekend in August.
“Soft plastics are one of the hardest types of waste for householders to deal with, so we decided to trial a once-off drop-off collection to help residents recycle them and to collect data to inform possible future programs,” Surf Coast Shire mayor Liz Pattison said.
“We had a great response with hundreds of residents taking up the opportunity to recycle the soft plastics they’d been collecting. The total customers through the drop-off sites for the trial period was 487, with 339 of them visiting the Torquay drop-off site.”
A total of 1328 bags full of soft plastic were deposited with sizes varying from a bread bag up to a 25kg dog-food bag.
The plastics will be baled and sent for processing in Melbourne to be converted into new soft plastics packaging and recycled road products.
The soft plastics trial is now complete, and Council are evaluating the results. If you still have soft plastics and need to dispose of them, please put them in your red lid landfill bin, not in your yellow lid recycling bin.
To provide community feedback on the soft plastics collection trial please complete the survey at surfcoast.vic.gov.au/softplasticsurvey
