The REDcycle stockpile has been processed, and the deal that cleared it has expired

The pile of soft plastic that REDcycle left behind when it collapsed in 2022 has been the unfinished business of Australian packaging ever since. On the participants’ own account to the regulator, it is now finished.

What the final report says

Condition 2 of ACCC authorisation AA1000673 required Coles, Woolworths and ALDI to file progress reports with the regulator, published on its public register. The report dated 22 July 2026 is the last of them, and the participants say so in terms: The Participants note that this is the final Progress Report under the Authorisation.

The Taskforce met once in the reporting period, on 28 May 2026, and the report records that This meeting was the final meeting of the Taskforce as the remediation plan has been executed to completion.

On the stockpile itself: As at July 2026, the legacy stockpile material has been processed by third party facilities. The participants add that they acknowledge the significant and collective effort it has taken to process the legacy soft plastics stockpile. Material that has not yet been turned into end products is held by third-party facilities which, the report says, the participants understand intend to refine and transform it.

Woolworths, the report notes, is working to terminate agreements entered into in reliance on the Authorisation ahead of the Authorisation’s expiry on 31 July 2026. That is what an authorisation ending in an orderly way looks like.

The in-store pilot at handover, and it is lopsided

The same report gives the size of the in-store collection pilot at the point it changed hands: 737 stores across the three retailers. The split is worth looking at.

Figures as tabled in the progress report. The totals row is our addition and each column sums to the report’s own figures. On those numbers Woolworths operates about 97 per cent of the collection points and Coles about 0.7 per cent, which is our arithmetic.

The report carries Coles’ own explanation, and it is fair to give it in full: Coles intends to expand the presence of in-store collection once the nascent Soft Plastic Stewardship Australia scheme has stabilised and there is consistent handling, management and processing of material flows in a maturing program.

Volume, and a sharp recent rise

Approximately 418 tonnes of soft plastics were collected at participating stores in the 2025-26 financial year, the report says. Customer engagement “has remained strong”, and between April and June 2026 the tonnage collected from participating stores increased by 36 per cent, which the participants attribute in part to Woolworths customer activations and media coverage including Channel 9 news in May 2026.

Set 418 tonnes a year against the scale of the problem and it is modest, which is the honest way to read it. It is also a pilot that grew by more than a third in a single quarter immediately before being handed to a national scheme.

What now runs, and what it costs your customers

The report states plainly that The operation of the in-store collection program was transitioned to SPSA in July 2026. Soft Plastic Stewardship Australia holds ACCC authorisation AA1000695-1, granted with conditions on 12 November 2025 and running to 4 December 2033.

On its own account SPSA is now operating rather than planning. It says its kerbside and supermarket in-store collections provide convenient access to soft plastics recycling for around 70% of Australians, that there are now over 700 collection points across Australia, in five States and Territories, and that its members include over 40 brands and retailers, and the cost impact is less than 1c per average food and grocery product.

That last figure is the one this trade should note. SPSA is funded by levies on brand owners and retailers, which means the businesses that put soft plastic packaging on the market pay for it, and the scheme’s own estimate of the pass-through is under a cent per product. It is SPSA’s number rather than an independent one, and we have not seen the fee schedule that produces it.

Correcting ourselves

Our 21 July piece said the permanent scheme was still in its planning phase, out for a Request for Information rather than collecting anything. That was accurate on the record available then and it is no longer true. The transition happened in July, and SPSA now describes an operating national scheme. We have added a dated update to that story pointing here.

Our reading

Offered as opinion on the sourced facts above. The temptation in July was to read a deadline arriving before a successor was ready as a gap, and we were careful then to say we did not know. Reading the final report, the sequence looks deliberate rather than lucky: the remediation plan finished, the Taskforce wound itself up in May, operations moved across in July, and the authorisation lapsed at the end of the month with agreements being terminated ahead of it.

What is genuinely unfinished is the shape of the thing that replaced it. A national scheme inherits a pilot in which one retailer runs 97 per cent of the collection points, and Coles has said on the record it is waiting for the scheme to stabilise before expanding. The number to watch is not the stockpile any more. It is whether 737 collection points and 418 tonnes a year become something proportionate to what the industry puts on the market, and what the levy costs when the fee schedule is set.