Photo reveals grim extent of company’s collapse

Pictures of a huge secret warehouse of soft plastic collected for recycling have been unearthed in northwest Sydney, revealing the grim extent of the failed REDcycle scheme.

Pictures from nine news shows hundreds of bales of bonded soft plastic stacked at a facility in Marsden Park, one of 15 such facilities in New South Wales.

The plastics were destined for recycling under a national scheme led by Melbourne-based REDcycle, founded in 2011.

Australians have been urged to dump their soft plastic waste in the trash cans at nearly 2,000 Coles or Woolworths supermarkets across the country to give it a new lease of life.

But the scheme was put on hold after November 2022. Investigation Shows REDcycle Has Stopped Recycling instead, he secretly stored tons of donated plastic in warehouses for months.

While, REDcycle said it’s “complete” to get the program up and running as soon as possible. But the company has since been declared insolvent, owed $5 million to creditors after failing to pay a fee for keeping their secret caches.

Woolworths and Coles took responsibility approximately 11,000 tonnes of collected waste stored at 32 secret sites in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. But even more trash has been found in 14 new locations, including for the first time in Tasmania, Queensland and Western Australia.

“To date, we have identified a total of 44 sites where REDcycle stockpiled soft plastic without our knowledge,” a spokeswoman for Coles and Woolworths said. Sydney Morning Herald.

As of March 2023, state environmental authorities Coles and Woolworth told the newspaper that the companies had registered 19 properties in New South Wales, 15 in Victoria, six in South Australia, two in Tasmania and one each in Queensland and Western Australia.

The New South Wales Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told news.com.au that the discovered site of Marsden Park was included in the final cleanup notice issued to Coles and Woolworth in March of this year.

The EPA said in a statement that supermarkets had to eliminate “a potential fire and pollution risk associated with a buildup of 5,200 tons of soft plastic” at 15 locations across the state.

Supermarkets have 10 weeks to clear stock, and will have another 12 months to develop long-term “legitimate” solutions for materials – “whether it’s recycling, exporting to be recycled overseas, or at the very least, sending them to landfill.”

Images of the Marsden Park area emerged the day after Woolworths announced its reopening. phasing out reusable plastic shopping bags for 15 cents in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.

The move makes Woolworths the first major supermarket in Australia to not offer plastic bags in stores, following the first statutory ban on single-use plastic bags in 2018.

This is an achievement. Woolworths store director Jeanette Fenske said the supermarket is “proud” of its creation and is “an important step towards greener grocery shopping across the country.”

“Bringing your own bags is the best outcome for the environment and we encourage our customers to continue like this,” she said in a statement.

“Paper bags will still be available for those who forget to bring their own, but ultimately we want to sell fewer bags.”

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Originally published as Another secret REDcycle plastic warehouse discovered after the company went bankrupt