Soft Plastics

Start Recycling your Soft Plastics with Curby!

Did you know that Australians use 70 billion pieces of soft plastic every year?

That’s almost 3,000 pieces per person — and it’s a major contributor to environmental pollution. Soft plastics make up around 20% of Australia’s plastic packaging waste.

By recycling soft plastics, we’re not only keeping waste out of landfill, we’re fuelling a circular economy — one where plastic is reused, repurposed, and reimagined into something new. More recycled content means less demand for virgin plastic, and that’s a win for everyone!

Let’s keep soft plastics in the loop — and out of the environment.

Start recycling today!

What are Soft Plastics?

Simply look up your item on RecycleMate

Any scrunchable soft plastics labelled with the 2, 4 or 5 recycling numbers

Common soft plastics include:

Soft Plastic Snack wrappers
Foil lined Chip packets
Soft Plastic Fresh produce bags
Soft Plastic Fruit netting (with the metal bits cut off)
Soft Plastic Toilet paper wrapping
Plastic carry bags
Protective plastic film used in consumer goods packaging
Dry pet food bags
Cling wrap

Want a Reminder? Download Flyers for Your Fridge or Noticeboard!

Download here

How are your soft plastics recycled

We’ve teamed up with leading Australian soft plastic processors and off-take partners to make sure your soft plastics are recycled responsibly and sustainably!

Once you have placed your CurbyBag in the yellow lidded bin, your CurbyBag will make its way to the Material Recovery Facility (MRF), where it will be picked out and separated from the rest of the comingled recycling. From here it is baled and sent for processing, which may vary between MRFs depending on the processing options available.

The baled soft plastics are delivered to iQRenew’s Smart Processing Engineered Commodity (SPEC) facility, where 100% post-consumer soft plastics are sorted and processed into feedstocks designed to meet manufacturers’ needs. These include:

- Pellets: perfect for chemical and mechanical recycling—and are used to make new CurbyBags!
- Flake: Perfect for extrusion and compression moulding for manufacturing durable items like buckets, boards, bollards… and the list goes on.

Want to see how the facility processes soft plastic – Click here to watch!