By the Bin Night Tonight team · Updated July 2026
Bread bags, chip packets, frozen vegetable bags, bubble wrap. Soft plastics are the most common recycling question in Australia, and the honest answer changed when the national supermarket program collapsed. Here is where things actually stand and what to do with them tonight.
A soft plastic is any plastic you can scrunch into a ball in your hand that stays scrunched. Bread bags, pasta packets, chip bags, cling wrap, produce bags, courier satchels, rice bags and the film lids on ready meals all pass the scrunch test. Rigid containers like milk bottles and yoghurt tubs do not, and those belong in the yellow bin as usual.
The scrunch test matters because sorting machinery at recycling facilities is built for rigid objects. Soft plastics wrap around the spinning discs and shafts that separate paper from containers, jamming equipment and shutting down entire sorting lines. That is why they are banned from almost every yellow bin in the country, not because the material is worthless.
For a decade the answer was simple: drop soft plastics at the REDcycle bins in Coles and Woolworths. That program collapsed in late 2022 when it emerged that the collected plastic was being stockpiled in warehouses rather than recycled, because processing capacity had not kept up with the volume Australians were returning.
Since then, the supermarkets have been rebuilding collection under a new industry program, restarting store drop offs in stages as actual processing capacity comes online. Availability depends on where you live, so the presence of a collection bin at your local store is worth checking rather than assuming.
Depending on where you live, you may have several options. In rough order of effort:
Do not put soft plastics loose in the yellow bin, and do not bag your recycling inside a plastic bag either. Bagged recycling cannot be sorted, so most facilities send the whole bag to landfill unopened. A yellow bin full of correctly loose containers with one bag of soft plastics on top can get the bin flagged as contaminated.
Also skip the wish cycling. Putting soft plastics in the yellow bin because it feels wrong to landfill them does real damage: it contaminates loads, jams machinery and increases the cost of recycling everything else. Until collection capacity catches up, the red bin is the responsible choice where no local option exists.
The soft plastics stream is the hardest household stream to recycle, so avoided packaging beats recycled packaging comfortably. Reusable produce bags, buying loose fruit and vegetables, choosing cardboard boxed products over film wrapped ones and reusing bread bags as bin liners all shrink the pile. None of it needs to be perfect; a household that halves its soft plastic waste has done more good than one that stockpiles it hoping for a recycling option.
No, not in standard kerbside recycling anywhere in Australia. They jam sorting machinery. A few councils run special soft plastics trials with separate bags or bins, but unless your council explicitly runs one, soft plastics go in the general waste bin.
Collection has been restarting in stages under a new industry program, with availability varying by store and region. Check whether your local store has a collection point before bringing plastics in.
Certified compostable bags belong in the FOGO bin only if your council accepts them, and many do not. Biodegradable is a marketing term, not a certification, and those bags belong in general waste. Neither type ever goes in the yellow bin.