Soft Plastics Recycling Trial
This trial commenced December 2022 for 12-months. It is currently fully subscribed and not accepting registrations at this time.
The City of Adelaide has partnered with Central Adelaide Waste and Recycling Authority and Australian Food & Grocery Council to bring city residents a kerbside collection soft plastics recycling trial.
The opportunity is part of our commitment to helping our community reduce waste and recycle more.
The 1,000 participating City of Adelaide residents will assess how we can recycle soft plastics through kerbside yellow recycling bins, keeping them out of landfill and giving them a new life. The City of Adelaide is using the Curby Soft Plastics Program for this trial. Soft plastics are placed into the designated yellow CurbyBag and placed in your yellow recycling bin. The yellow bags will be manually collected at the Central Adelaide Waste and Recycling Authority materials recovery facility, where they will be bailed and sent interstate to APR Plastics in Victoria to be processed and recycled. You can find out more about how the program works on the Curby website.
The information will help inform the design of a scalable model for large-scale “bag-in-bin" kerbside collection and sorting of soft plastic packaging. This will enable the creation of a sustainable and efficient advanced recycling industry for soft plastics across Australia.
Funding for this trial is provided by the City of Adelaide, the Australian food and grocery manufacturing industry, Green Industries SA and the Australian Government.
Frequently asked questions
The best way to contact Curby is through your app or email [email protected]
This trial is not connected to the REDcycle store drop-off scheme and is not affected by the announcement that REDcycle has temporarily paused its scheme from 9 November 2022. The City of Adelaide trial will continue uninterrupted, and the plastics collected in the trial will go for processing at an advanced recycling centre.
Loose soft plastics, or any bag holding recyclable items, still must not go in your yellow recycling bin. Loose soft plastics jam up recycling machinery in trucks and at sorting facilities. The yellow CurbyBags have been provided specifically to be the right strength and easy to identify and sort when filled and sealed correctly. It’s very important to keep all other recycling items in your yellow recycling bin loose.
Soft plastic packaging does an important job keeping food fresh and safe and keeping products intact. Instead of being sent to landfill, it can be recycled. The Soft Plastics Recycling Trial is part of work to design an industry-led scheme for recycling soft plastic packaging in Australia. The scheme aims to create an advanced recycling industry producing recycled, food-grade soft plastic packaging, which currently isn’t made in Australia. The trial is one of a number being conducted to help design the model for kerbside collection and sorting of used soft plastics.
This trial is part of the National Plastics Recycling Scheme project (NPRS), driven by Australia’s food and grocery manufacturing industry. The NPRS project is designing a scheme to take hard-to-recycle soft plastic packaging out of the waste stream and recycle it into new, food-grade material. As a true circular economy model, the NPRS makes it easier for people to recycle soft plastics at home and supports the development of a new, advanced recycling industry here in Australia.
The trial has been made possible by the support of AFGC member companies, which have signed up as Foundation Supporters of the soft plastics recycling scheme. Visit Australian Food and Grocery Council for more information.