In this day and age, everybody is trying to do their bit in reducing waste, but some things seem unavoidable, like using soft plastics; Wholly Shrink aims to help with that.
The company offers the Shrinker, a compacter device that achieves volume reduction of soft plastics by 70 per cent. But why is this important? Can’t these plastics just go straight in the bin?
Soft plastics can’t be put in the yellow plastic recycling bin. If you put soft plastic in the red bin, it goes directly into the landfill where it won’t completely decompose for anywhere between 20 and 500 years. Fortunately, Lane Cove Council offers ‘HomeCycle’, a service providing free doorstep pick-ups for tricky to recycle items. Lately the feedback is that there is a local wait for Homecycle pick ups and that means bags of soft plastics around your home.
You can also now take soft plastics to Woolworths for recycling, but that means hauling heaps of bags to the supermarket.
Wholly Shrink founder and CEO Brice Lamarque says their company coincides with these services to influence people into forming greener recycling habits.
“Our mission is very simple. It’s to help people divert soft plastic from ending up into the environment,” the founder told ITC.
“For an average Joe bloke like me, no soft plastic at all is virtually impossible, and I think a lot of people are like me… what we are proposing is a very convenient way to help people adopt the habit with no friction at all.”
It’s easy to disregard how much soft plastics we use, but most of us collect armfuls of it every shop. Wrappers and bags used to store toilet paper, pet food, frozen foods, bread, fruit, cereal and more are all recyclable materials which are likely to turn up in the shopping cart each week.
Households can only book HomeCycle once a month in Lane Cove. In that time plastics that are not thrown out can build up quite quickly. The Shrinker compacts this waste so it’s far easier for people to store it efficiently, making it easier to keep and facilitate recycling habits.
Wholly Start
Brice had the idea for his company during COVID, when the world was at home consuming more packaged foods than ever. He was a packaging manager at Woolworths Group and was constantly thinking of ways to reduce plastic use within his job, and better ways to store it at home.
“I started to compact it [soft plastics] into DIY systems like Pringle tubes. I thought it was working very well. It was quite interesting. So I started to share this with neighbours and friends in the area, and they all told me, wow, this is really cool,” he shared.
From here, an engineering friend helped him lock down the design that efficiently reduces plastic volume but also fits under the kitchen sink. Once this was established, they began selling the product online with great success.
The Shrinker is made from 100 per cent recyclable materials and although Brice says he’d like to manufacture it in Australia, at the moment operations are in Shenzhen, China for economical reasons.
However, it does fit in line with the company’s global vision of recycling soft plastics; though right now it’s focused mainly within the Commonwealth where they can approach local Council’s to see how they can work together.
Soft plastics collection points (paid, unpaid and drop off) are available in all Australian states and territories besides the NT. New Zealand, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales also have points.
“This is a cool product, a cool gadget, but really, we want to go a little bit beyond that and really just help people recycle more – or not necessarily even recycle more – it could be simply the outcome is there’s less that ends up in the environment, and if in the process that makes this [the Shrinker] obsolete, fair enough,” Brice said.
Recycling Methods
Even with the Shrinker, waiting once a month for Council to collect your soft plastics can be an inconvenience. Fortunately, there are other ways – if you feel like doing it yourself.
After Australian soft plastic recycling company REDCycle collapsed in 2022, approximately 11,000 tonnes of the material was left in significant stockpiles around numerous warehouses. In 2024, the Ministry of the Environment and Water and the Ministry of Climate Change and the Environment and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) created the Soft Plastics Taskforce (SPT).
This trial program is a collaborative effort from the three major supermarket chains, Coles, Woolworths and ALDI. The ACCC granted interim authorisation for the companies to process REDCycle’s stockpiles as long as they submit quarterly progress reports.
Since 4 October 2024, 36 tonnes of soft plastics have been collected through the instore collection pilot program, which is now operating in 43 stores across NSW and Victoria.
This includes the Woolworths in Lane Cove. Their recycling station is located near the escalator coming up from the car parks.
Keep in mind it’s still not a bad idea to use the Shrinker with whatever recycling method you choose as condensing the plastics together with the product makes them heavier and less likely to be blown in the wind during the recycling transit process.
If you’d like to buy a Shrinker, you can do so here.
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