In November 2022, one of Australia’s most recognised recycling programs collapsed overnight. REDcycle had sat inside supermarket entrances for years, collecting soft plastic packaging that households were told had nowhere else to go. Then it stopped, and it emerged the material had been stockpiling all along.
It should have ended there. Another well-intentioned program that ran out of road, another reason for people to stop bothering.
It didn’t end there. The problem was never that Australians wouldn’t recycle soft plastic. It was that the country didn’t yet have anywhere for it to go.
That gap is where iQRenew, the Central Coast recycler we partner with at SupaCell, went to work. What they built is also why we exist.
This article looks at what happened after the collapse, why the real barrier was capacity rather than willingness, and how the material that comes out the other end of that fix becomes the insulation in Australian homes.
When a Program Collapses, the Plastic Doesn’t Disappear
REDcycle’s failure left roughly 11,000 tonnes of collected soft plastic sitting in storage with no destination. That material didn’t stop existing. It sat there while the systems needed to actually process it were built around it.
That is the part of the story that gets lost. Collection was never the hard part. Australians had already shown they would separate their soft plastics and put them in the right bin.
Recycling doesn’t fail at the household. It fails when there is nowhere for the material to go next.
Building the Capacity That Was Missing
iQRenew’s response was to build a facility purpose-built for post-consumer soft plastic, at Kundle Kundle near Taree, and use it to work through the REDcycle stockpile while standing up ongoing processing capacity.
Insight: according to Newcastle Herald coverage of the facility, Australia places around 580,000 tonnes of soft plastic on the market every year. iQRenew’s plant is built to process up to 14,000 tonnes annually, with an expansion planned to take that to 24,000 tonnes, roughly two and a half times the old REDcycle program’s capacity.
Those numbers matter because they show the actual scale of the challenge. One facility will not solve a 580,000-tonne problem, but it proves the model works and gives Australia a working example to build on.
iQRenew’s CEO Danial Gallagher has been direct about this: the missing piece was never willingness to recycle, it was the ability to build enough capacity, nationally, to convert soft plastic into a high-quality raw material at scale.
- For more on how this partnership between 4 Seasons Industries and iQRenew came together, read here: Engineering the Circular Economy: How Regional Collaboration Redefined Manufacturing
From Household Bin to Manufacturing Line
Here’s the simple version. Soft plastic goes into the yellow-lid bin at home. Councils, including Central Coast Council’s Curby program, collect it. iQRenew processes it into usable material. We take that material and repurpose it as part of the binding agent in SupaCell insulation, replacing a portion of the virgin low-melt polyester that most manufacturers rely on.
That chain only works if every link holds. Take away household participation and there is nothing to collect. Take away council collection and there is nothing to process. Take away a manufacturer willing to use the output and the processing has no purpose.
- Households sort it by using kerbside soft plastics collection correctly
- Councils collect it, with programs like Curby setting a benchmark other regions are following
- iQRenew processes it, turning collected material into usable feedstock
- We manufacture with it, building that feedstock into insulation for Australian homes
We saw this partnership from the beginning, not as buying an input from a supplier, but as sharing a problem. To read more about where that shared approach started, read here: Building the Future, One Fibre at a Time: The SupaCell Story of Australian Innovation
Proof You Can See in the Batt
Look closely at a SupaCell batt and you can find fragments of the material’s origin: traces of print, cardboard, and the familiar yellow of a Curby collection bag. These are not flaws to hide. They are the visible end of the chain that starts with someone taking their soft plastic to the right bin.
A recycling program can collapse. The demand for what it collects does not have to collapse with it. That is what a stable end market means in practice: insulation that stays in Australian homes for decades, keeping recovered material in productive use rather than leaving it dependent on a single collection scheme.
We go into more detail on how soft plastics function as a binding agent, not just a recycled ingredient, here: The Science of Soft Plastics as a Binder: How SupaCell Turned a Contaminant into a Core Ingredient
A Chain That Needs Both Ends Working
REDcycle’s collapse was a reminder that collection alone was never going to solve Australia’s soft plastics problem. It took a company willing to build processing capacity, and it takes manufacturers willing to build that processed material into something people actually use.
We are one part of that second half. Every batt of SupaCell insulation depends on collection continuing to happen, on iQRenew’s facility continuing to process, and on us continuing to find a use for what comes out the other end.
The future of soft plastics recycling in Australia will not be built by any single program. It will be built by a chain that keeps working, end to end, long after the headlines about the last one move on.
Have questions about this article, or anything else about SupaCell? We would love to hear from you. Get in touch with our team today.