Help the non-alcoholic drinks industry Make Recycling Simple through caps collection and a single logo for CDS and home recycling! 

Australia is in a waste crisis. In the 2018-2019 financial year, Australia generated 76 million tonnes of waste, a 10% increase since 2016-17. HDPE plastic (which is commonly found in caps) was below government recovery targets due to much of it going unnecessarily to landfill. 

The non-alcoholic drinks industry cares about what happens to its drinks containers and wants to help fix this problem. This is why we are calling on governments around the country to allow bottle caps collection in Container Deposit Schemes (CDS) and kerbside recycling, and to approve a single logo which shows you how you can recycle your drinks containers whether it’s through your kerbside recycling bin or by getting 10c at your local CDS collection point.  

So why will this help? Studies show that drink caps are the second most littered item in the Australian environment, after cigarette butts. Our industry estimates that 10 tonnes of HDPE plastic caps aren’t recycled every year and either end up in landfill or are lost in the environment. There’s plenty of infrastructure already to collect these caps, but some programs are outdated and don’t recover them even though they can.. HDPE is one of the most high-value plastics around, and there are countless innovative ways to remanufacture it, turning bottle caps into wheelchairs, playgrounds, prosthetic limbs and even new wheelie bins! We need your help to convince governments to make this easy switch and collect caps before they litter the environment and enlarge our landfills. 

But what’s this about a logo? The Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) is our country’s preferred recycling logo, with support from the federal Government, APCO (Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation), and some industry and business groups. We have worked with numerous drinks manufacturers to help them find a way to put the ARL on their containers and think it is a great initiative. However, the current ARL only covers recycling in your home bins and we think a single logo on the label of your drink which covers both CDS and home recycling will ensure more drinks containers are collected. This will be better for our environment and ensure your drinks containers can be remade into more drinks containers (and wheelchairs, playgrounds, prosthetic limbs and wheelie bins). 

Our whole industry is gearing up to put the ARL on their labels by the end of 2023, but if we can’t get the single logo and its new wording on the label ”at home or 10c at collection points” approved we are not going to be able to put the logo on our labels. We are calling on state and territory governments to change the current 10-cent wording to allow for the combined ARL/CDS logo to live on the labels of Australia’s favourite drinks.  

Please help us in our quest to make recycling easier. 

Sign this petition, visit www.makerecyclingsimple.org to find out how to write to your state or territory Environment Minister and share this message with #MakeRecyclingSimple to your networks.

The non-alcoholic drinks industry wants to ensure it gets every bottle, can and cap back so it can recycle them into more drinks containers. We are building recycling plants, investing in CDS and doing all we can to ensure no drinks container ends up in landfill. Come join us to make recycling and Australia’s environment the best it can be! 
 
#ClosetheContainerLoop  
#KeepContainersCircular 
#KeepAustraliaCircular