Recycling guide for Australian households

The simple rule: clean, dry, loose

If you remember one thing from this guide, make it this: recycling needs to be clean, dry, and loose in the bin. Clean means a quick rinse; dry means no liquid sloshing around; loose means not bagged up.

Those three things alone solve about 80% of contamination issues. Soiled packaging, bagged recyclables, and tetra-packs of milk dumped in unopened are the three most common causes of an entire truckload getting sent to landfill.

What belongs in the yellow recycling bin

• Paper and cardboard. Newspapers, magazines, envelopes, cereal boxes, pizza boxes (only if grease-free), flattened cardboard.
• Glass bottles and jars. Wine bottles, beer bottles, jam jars, sauce bottles. Metal lids can stay on glass jars. Broken glass should be wrapped and put in general waste instead, for the safety of sorting staff.
• Aluminium and steel cans. Drink cans, food tins, empty aerosol cans (deodorant, cooking spray). Rinsed but not crushed.
• Rigid plastic containers. Milk bottles, shampoo bottles, yoghurt tubs, ice-cream containers, soft-drink bottles. Caps off and put in general waste (they're often a different plastic).

If you're not sure about something, the safer choice is general waste. One wishful recyclable doesn't ruin a load, but a habit of bin-and-hope does.

What doesn't belong (even though it looks like it should)

• Soft plastics. Shopping bags, cling film, bread bags, chip packets, frozen-food bags. They jam the sorting machinery. Some supermarkets run a soft-plastics return programme; check what's currently operating in your area.
• Polystyrene foam. The white packaging from appliances and the foam meat trays. Not accepted in kerbside recycling. Specialist drop-off facilities take it.
• Coffee cups. The plastic lining means a standard takeaway cup is not recyclable. Compostable cups need a commercial composter, not your green bin. The lid alone is sometimes recyclable depending on the material.
• Textiles and clothing. Donate wearable items to charity. Worn-out textiles go to dedicated textile recyclers like Upparel or specific council drop-offs.
• Electronics, batteries, light bulbs. Never in any kerbside bin. Batteries cause fires in trucks and at sorting facilities. Drop them at Bunnings, Officeworks, or council e-waste centres.
• Nappies, tissues, paper towels. Soiled paper products contaminate paper recycling. These go in general waste.
• Hoses, ropes, cords. "Tanglers" wrap around the sorting machinery. None of them belong in recycling.

The list of what doesn't belong is longer than what does, which is why so many households get caught out. When in doubt, general waste.

Habits that make a real difference

• Rinse for 5 seconds, not 5 minutes. A quick swirl with water from a glass of tap water is enough. You're not aiming for spotless; you're aiming for "won't attract ants."
• Don't bag your recycling. Tip it loose into the yellow bin. If you collect it in a kitchen bin liner, empty the contents out and reuse the liner for general waste.
• Flatten cardboard, don't shred. Folded boxes save space. Shredded paper is too small for mills to recover and ends up sifted out as waste.
• Keep the lid closed on collection day. An overflowing bin with the lid open can have items blown out by wind, and some trucks refuse to lift bins that won't close.
• Caps off plastic bottles. The bottle is recyclable; the cap is usually a different plastic. Caps go in general waste, or save them for community collection programmes like Lids 4 Kids.

None of these takes any meaningful extra time. Done together, they take your recycling from "useful in theory" to "actually gets recycled."

Why contamination matters

Australian recycling facilities sort material at speed using a combination of magnets, optical sensors, air jets and human pickers. When the wrong material goes in, the whole batch is downgraded; a high enough contamination rate sends the entire load to landfill.

Contamination across Australian kerbside recycling averages around 15%. That number includes the easy fixes (bagged recycling, soft plastics) and the harder ones (batteries causing fires). Getting it down is a public-good problem that household-level changes really do address.