TRANSCRIPT:
This factory is all about plastic.
Chocolate wrappers, plastic bags, yoghurt containers and white polystyrene boxes are making their way across a 60,000 square metre complex - to be broken down, separated by size, and sorted in a fully automated process.
Mattias Philipsson is the CEO of Sweden Plastic Recycling.
"This what the end result looks like. Here we have each plastic type separately sorted. Here we have ketchup bottles. Here we have a creme fraiche packaging. Here we have a lot of candy wrappers. Here we have rigid, different plastics. And everything is sorted separately, so it can be recycled separately."
The new plant is called Site Zero, built to receive 200,000 tons of plastic household waste a year
While there isn’t yet a market for each type of plastic they sort, upcoming EU legislation is set to require new plastic packaging to contain at least 35 percent recycled material.
The legislation is part of a worldwide push to tackle what Robert Blasiak from the Stockholm Resilience Centre says is a massive plastics pollution problem.
"To date, about 8 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced globally. It's basically about one metric ton for every person alive today. In most of the world, there aren't waste management facilities equipped to deal with that scale of plastic pollution... It's thought that only about 9 percent of that has been recycled, about 12 percent has been incinerated and about 79 percent has entered the natural environment into the ocean, into landfills, into waterways. It's still with us."
There's been a worldwide push for sustainability and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and some signs at the grassroots level that the green message is getting through.
In Stockholm, a supermarket called ICA is stocking a grey detergent bottle made from Site Zero's recycled materials.
ICA packaging manager Karin Jawerth.
"This particular product is the flagship of the circularity that we are trying to achieve, where our recycled packaging becomes a new packaging, and it's only coming from Swedish households."
Karin Jawerth says the supermarket wants to work with Site Zero to use fewer types of plastic, avoiding dark plastics that machines struggle to sort and avoiding too much labelling that reduces the quality of the final recycled raw material.
"The most important purpose of the packaging is to protect the product. And it doesn't matter how recyclable the packaging is if it doesn't protect the product and we generate more food waste... And it's not only about recyclability when it comes to sustainable packaging. It's also about how much packaging material you're using, how well you can empty the products."
There have also been moves to reduce plastic usage in Australia.
Many Australian state government have introduced laws to ban single use plastics like cups and cutlery, with the exception of Tasmania - and the Northern Territory Government has committed to ban single-use plastics by 2025 under the top end's Circular Economy Strategy.
Coles, Woolworths and Aldi are hoping to restart soft-plastics collection and recycling by the end of the year - but that self-imposed deadline might be hard to achieve because of a lack of recycling facilities.
But Robert Blasiak says the centre's research indicates corporations overwhelmingly view sustainability solely through the prism of recycling while the other stages of the plastic life cycle are largely ignored.
With plastic waste produced globally set to almost triple by 2060, he says a change in perception is required.
"We need to focus upstream to the earlier stages of the plastics life cycle if we're going to bring the plastics footprint down. That means looking at product design, that means looking at alternatives to plastic packaging, reducing the amount of plastic that's actually needed in packaging, in operations, in shipment, in transport, all these different stages that come before you even start to think about recycling or incinerating or disposing of plastic."
