Indigo Shire Soft Plastics Collection System - Litter Finalist - 2026 Tidy Towns
An orange bag in your existing yellow-lid recycling bin. That's the entire ask behind Indigo Shire's soft plastics trial, and it's precisely why it worked.
After national soft plastics collection schemes collapsed, leaving households with nowhere to put bread bags, chip packets and cling wrap, Indigo Shire Council partnered with Soft Plastics Stewardship Australia and Cleanaway to trial a fix that didn't require a new bin, a new truck, or a special trip anywhere. Residents fill a distinctive orange bag with eligible soft plastics and drop it straight into their normal recycling bin. At Cleanaway's sorting facility, the bags are pulled out and sent for processing into a liquid oil base for remanufacturing.
The council's clearest finding: convenience beats good intentions every time. People will adopt a new recycling behaviour when it slots into a routine they already have, not when it demands a special effort.
No new infrastructure, no extra collection service, just a smarter use of what already exists on every street in Indigo Shire.
The X-factor is exactly that restraint: solving one of Australia's hardest waste streams by adding almost nothing to the system.
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