“The Albanese government’s failure to act on packaging reform as promised is a repudiation of the public’s support of recycling and concerns about the health and environmental impacts of plastic pollution,” [the director of the Boomerang Alliance, Jeff Angel, said].
“The scale and breadth of outrage across a broad set of stakeholders from green groups to industry to state governments is something I have not seen before.”
A suite of potential rules would have set design standards for packaging, for example by prohibiting use of certain chemicals, restricting unnecessary or excessive layers of packaging, or limiting the amount of empty space permitted within packaging.
Other potential changes could have required producers to be responsible for the packaging across its full life cycle – from the design stage to how the packaging is used and then disposed of.
The government’s decision to shelve its plans was due to its concern that any costs arising from changes could be passed on to consumers when they bought products such as groceries.
That is an issue a well, but landfills are supposed to have layers of liners, heavy plastic, layers of waste, more plastic, so they don’t leak as such.
Longer term better solutions could be a masonry shell of some kind that would be more durable.
Edit: Also landfilling releases much smaller amounts of the chemicals, while burning releases ALL of them, and all at once. Nature can often absorb smaller amounts over time, but get overwhelmed by too much at one time, ie previous extinction events like that siberian volcanoes for thousands of years until one of the kharsts hit massive coal deposits that flooded co2 faster than the earth could absorb it. End edit.
There aren’t any good solutions, but landfilling is less bad. The only good solution is to stop making it and that won’t happen because entrenched interests prevent us from improving anything in this foul year of 2026.
Not just 2026. This problem has been developing for decades.
There’s been all manner of trials to deal with this problem, including coming up with bacteria that ‘eats up’ waste plastic. But nothing seems to be implemented, other than recycling and burning. I am surprised they haven’t come up with some chemical system to dissolve plastic into smaller quantities of materials that can be used in construction and other applications or that can be safely changed into less dangerous materials . Some recycled plastics are already being used in construction, etc, but that’s just not enough. .