There’s a particular kind of packaging most households recognise instantly: the scrunchy film on bread bags, produce bags, chip packets and bubble wrap. It’s the sort of plastic that looks harmless until you try to deal with it. And in Australia, that problem got louder in 2022 when the country’s biggest soft plastics scheme collapsed.
The breakdown didn’t just mean fewer bins or fewer drop-off points. It exposed a structural weakness in the recycling system itself. Flexible plastics can’t go into kerbside bins because they jam sorting machinery, and globally less than 10 per cent of plastic gets recycled. In Australia, soft plastics are among the least recovered materials—mostly left out of kerbside recycling and dependent on voluntary drop-off schemes. The gap is obvious, and it’s been hard to ignore.
Against that backdrop, Box Divvy—an Australia-wide community food network—has quietly built something closer to an end-to-end pipeline. Operating across NSW, Victoria and the ACT, the group runs more than 350 neighbourhood food Hubs, marketing itself as “the Unsupermarket.” The wider idea is decentralised food distribution: seasonal produce and pantry goods from mostly Australian suppliers, with pricing transparency and less waste from longer retail supply chains. Now, the soft plastics initiative extends that logic to the packaging that still follows people home.
The network’s approach is both simple and strangely detailed when you look at it: collect what can’t be kerbside processed, then move it through credible infrastructure. Over the past 12 months, Box Divvy worked to scale the program across its network. The NSW Environment Protection Authority contributed 50% of the upfront cost of 500 dedicated 240 litre soft plastics bins, with Box Divvy funding the rest—plus the ongoing collection and processing costs. The first 140 bins were installed in December, and a further 170 have since been deployed. Around 90 per cent of Box Divvy Hubs in NSW and the ACT now host a soft plastics bin, with additional sites still joining.
Somewhere around that momentum, the waste numbers start to matter. Box Divvy says it is diverting approximately 2.5 tonnes from landfill each month, with expanded rollout expected to push monthly volumes toward three tonnes. Members can bring scrunchable plastics to their local Hub on collection day at no cost. Hub operators are paid by Box Divvy to host and manage the bin. Collected plastics are picked up weekly by sustainability partner ReSmart, transported to a Sydney aggregation warehouse, then sent to an EPA approved Victorian processor—where it is converted into resin and manufactured into new food grade bags.
And that’s the piece people often skip: the end market. In a deliberate circular economy move, Box Divvy plans to purchase these recycled bags to package dry goods like nuts and beans sold through its network. Mikey Dukey from ReSmart told Misryoum newsroom reporting that rebuilding confidence in soft plastics recycling depends on credible end markets, arguing that reliable infrastructure and a clear pathway from neighbourhood Hub to processor are what make verified outcomes possible. There’s something grounding about it—like the small thud of a bin lid closing at a local Hub, followed by the quiet idea that the plastic won’t just disappear into a black box.
This effort builds on a smaller 2024 pilot in the Southern Highlands, where six Hubs collected 750 kilograms within months. Scaling hasn’t been just “more bins” either; Box Divvy says it required coordination across logistics, processing and funding partners so the system would hold up long term. Collection volumes are tracked weekly, letting the network verify diversion rates and adjust as the program expands—though it’s still early enough that you can feel the uncertainty underneath. Anton van den Berg, co-founder of Box Divvy, framed the initiative as responsibility at the supply-chain level: circular economy only works if someone closes the loop, and communities can take responsibility for the waste that flows through them… provided the loop actually stays connected.
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