Why your recycling might not be recycled

I once paid an Airtasker a suspiciously low fee to haul rubbish out of my magic workshop.

A mountain of cardboard tubes, tangled wires from my attempts to build my own spring snakes, and 3D printer. It was as only after I'd done the deal that I realise that price came in lower than the official recycling centre fees.

Which left me staring at the back of his van, thinking: where the hell is this stuff going?

“Mate, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

That was the entire sales pitch.

And I believed him for about three seconds—just long enough to close the roller door.

The problem with recycling is the same as the problem with magic tricks: it only works if you don’t look too closely.

As long as we put the bottles in the yellow bin and the soft plastic in the supermarket bag drop, we get the sweet relief of responsibility transferred.

The curtain falls. The rabbit is safe. We applaud ourselves.

And then along come companies like REDcycle.

For years, REDcycle ran the soft-plastics collection bins at Coles and Woolworths.

Bright green boxes promising salvation for chip packets and bread bags. Shoppers dutifully stuffed them full, imagining their waste reborn as park benches and bollards.

In reality, REDcycle secretly stockpiled more than 11,000 tonnes of plastic across warehouses in Victoria and New South Wales. Pallets of the stuff stacked to the rafters, hidden like a hoarder’s shame.

When the scandal broke in 2022, the bins vanished overnight. Coles and Woolies pulled out, councils fumed, and the plastics were left sitting there like evidence in a magician’s failed trick.

Here’s the con.

Step one: The Promise. “We can recycle this. It won’t cost you a thing. It’ll even help the planet.”

Step two: The Secret. There’s no market for the waste. No company can make money turning chip packets into picnic furniture.

Step three: The Vanish. Hide the evidence in warehouses until the rent comes due and the reporters arrive.

It’s the same playbook as any street scam. Show the punter the prize, distract them with the patter, and hope they’ve moved on before they notice the pea is gone.

And then there’s the Darwin tyres.

In 2024, a Northern Territory builder imported fifty tonnes of used tyres, supposedly for tiny-home foundations. A creative idea, if you squint. The tyres arrived, were dumped, and promptly abandoned. The company behind it—grandly titled “Seoul Traders”—vanished. Locals were left staring at a rubber mountain in the tropics, wondering how a supposed recycling initiative had turned into a mosquito-friendly eyesore.

The environmental minister called it “irresponsible.” Which is bureaucrat-speak for “we have no idea how to clean this up without a bonfire.”

Technically, the scams work because recycling is an accounting trick more than a process. Australia exports mountains of “recyclable” waste to Southeast Asia every year. On paper, it counts as recycled the moment it’s loaded onto a ship. Whether it’s burned, buried, or picked apart by underpaid workers in Malaysia is someone else’s problem.

The same sleight of hand happens domestically. “Recycling” often means “downcycling”—plastic bottles turned into park benches, which will eventually break down and go to landfill anyway. Companies slap “100% recyclable” on packaging that no council can actually process. It’s like a magician promising a spectacular escape, then quietly swapping in a trick pair of handcuffs.

None of this is new.

The first big wave of recycling scams hit in the 1970s and ’80s, when beverage companies facing bans on disposable containers promoted the idea of consumer recycling. They wanted to shift the blame from producers to households. It worked. Instead of questioning why a soft drink needed three layers of plastic, we asked ourselves whether we were sorting our bins properly. That guilt has kept the industry running ever since.

Today, the cultural resonance is clear. We’ve built an entire civic religion around recycling. The ritual of rinsing, sorting, and bin-night performance. To question it feels almost heretical. But behind the curtain, the industry still runs on export dumping, stockpiling, and greenwashing. The trick hasn’t changed—only the props.

And so I think back to the Airtasker and his too-cheap rubbish run. Maybe he did the right thing. Maybe he carted it dutifully to the recycling centre and ate the cost.

Or maybe my old cardboard tubes are sitting in a warehouse next to REDcycle’s shame.

Or propping up a pile of abandoned tyres in Darwin.

If you see them, let me know. I’ve got a new trick I could use them for.