The Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO) is the organisation currently in charge of setting and managing the 2025 National Packaging Targets, and providing advice to businesses to help them reduce packaging waste.
All four supermarkets assessed in this report are members of APCO – meaning they are required to report certain information about their packaging and products. APCO aggregates the data and reports on Australia’s progress as a whole.
In 2020 APCO identified nine priority items to be phased out by 2025. These “problematic and unnecessary single-use plastic packaging” items are identified below. While this list takes a great step towards decreasing some highly littered and unrecoverable plastic items, it detracts from the fact that all disposable packaging has the potential to be problematic, and many other forms of packaging are unnecessary.
APCO’s list of priority items:
- Lightweight plastic shopping bags
- Fragmentable plastics
- Expanded polystyrene (EPS) packaging for food and beverage service and retail fresh produce
- EPS loose fill packaging
- Moulded EPS packaging for white/brown goods and electronics
- Rigid polyvinyl chloride (PVC) packaging
- Rigid polystyrene (PS) packaging
- Opaque polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles
- Rigid plastic packaging with carbon black
All four supermarkets have made progress towards phasing out these items, but examples remain on some supermarket shelves.