Recycling sounds simple right up until someone actually tries to build the facility that does it. In Moss Vale, in the New South Wales Southern Highlands, a proposed plastics recycling plant has spent six years stuck in planning knockbacks, appeals and now a Land and Environment Court hearing that pulled in hundreds of locals wanting a say. Here's what the stand off tells us about just how much machinery sits behind the word "recycle."
The six year fight, in brief
Developer Repoly first proposed the facility back in 2020, aiming to process up to 120,000 tonnes of mixed plastic waste a year on Beaconsfield Road. The Independent Planning Commission knocked it back in January 2025, and Repoly is now appealing that decision in the Land and Environment Court, with the hearing running for around nine days at the Moss Vale Civic Centre. On the first day alone, eight residents addressed the court and more than 500 people turned up to the site, according to ABC News (19 October 2026).
Why the neighbours are nervous
Resident Jean McKern, who lives next door to the proposed site, told the court about disrupted sleep and the stress of six years of uncertainty. Others raised concerns about noise, lighting, fire risk, wastewater and microplastics, plus the proximity to a childcare centre and a park. Self funded retirees Graham Horden and his wife said their plans for a quiet retirement had been upended. It is a genuinely tough spot for everyone involved, and also a handy reminder that a project built to solve a plastic problem can spend six years creating a waiting list problem of its own before it processes a single bottle.
The bigger picture: recycling capacity was never going to catch up
Australia has been trying to rebuild soft plastics recycling capacity ever since the REDcycle collapse, a saga we went through in detail in REDcycle's Legacy Plastic Backlog Is Finally Cleared, So Why Isn't Soft Plastics Recycling Fixed? Australia recycled just 20 per cent of its plastic packaging in 2023-24, against a 2025 target of 70 per cent, barely up from 19 per cent the year before, while the average Australian gets through 251kg of packaging a year, according to APCO's 2023-24 Australian Packaging Consumption and Recovery Data, published 1 December 2025.
REDcycle showed what happens when collection outpaces the ability to actually process and sell the result: a program that gathered material faster than anyone could move it on, because recycled soft plastic is hard to separate from contamination and there are not many buyers for it next to cheap virgin plastic. A new plant does not close a fifty point gap, it is one more attempt to catch up to a mountain that keeps growing. Which raises the real question: if "it'll get recycled" is the thing that makes a piece of plastic packaging feel fine to buy, what happens to that feeling once you're living next to a plastic recycling plant?
If you want the full picture of what actually happens to the plastic sitting in your bathroom bin right now, we broke it down here: What Happens to Your Empty Bathroom Plastic? The Problem in Numbers.
If only making plastic took this much paperwork
Six years, one Land and Environment Court hearing and five hundred objectors turning up to have their say, just to find out whether Australia gets one more plastic recycling plant. If plastic waste had to go through that much admin to get made in the first place, we reckon there would be a lot less of it floating around to recycle.
This is why Viva doesn't use plastic. The numbers don't stack up, and the planet side of this isn't even up for debate, plastic pollution and landfill are a settled problem, not a theory. What it's doing to us is still being worked out, and that's exactly why we're not waiting for a final verdict before we stop adding to it. It's also the urgency sitting behind the Masters research Murray’s been doing at QUT, on how packaging talks us into saying yes to plastic before we've thought about any of it.