The Fill-On-Site Plastic Can

The Unpackit Award for Australia’s Worst Packaging is awarded to fill-on-site plastic cans that are being pushed as the next trendy cup at cafés across the country.

This award was hotly contended, with no shortage of problematic packaging being pushed into every corner of our lives. In the end, the award went to these cans because they represent everything that’s problematic with packaging in Australia. They’re single-use and built for on-the-go consumption, making them high-risk for littering. They combine plastic and metal in a way that makes them unrecyclable and are also excluded from container deposit schemes, meaning there’s nowhere obvious to put them when you’re done and no financial incentive to return them.

What’s worse, these cans are often replacing existing reusable glasses and cups. One nominator watched a café hand them out to dine-in customers sitting at a table, with a glass of water in front of them, while also refusing to serve the coffee in a reusable cup. Their nomination called out sealed cans for being “unnecessary, hard to recycle, and seemingly trying to make single-use cool”. They also noted the café “refused to serve me a coffee in a reusable cup for dine-in”.

Another nominator noted the cans have “No disposal instructions, [are] unrecyclable due to mixed materials (PET plastic, aluminium), [and are] not eligible for 10c refund”.

Western Australia has already banned fill-on-site plastic cans and others may follow. But state-by-state bans will always be one step behind the next trend, playing endless whack-a-mole against a rising tide of plastic overproduction. A new problematic product can launch, scale and embed itself across thousands of venues, just like sealed cans have done. This is exactly the gap that national packaging laws must close. The Australian Government committed to developing mandatory national packaging laws in 2022. These standards – which must set baseline rules about what can and can’t be put into a single-use format – are still not in place.

The Udder Way

The Unpackit Award for Australia’s Best Packaging is awarded to The Udder Way, a Tasmanian business that eliminates single-use plastic milk bottles by running a reusable milk keg system.

Every morning, at tens of thousands of cafes across the country, a scene plays out that we’re all too familiar with. A barista opens a fresh bottle of milk, pours it into a jug, and chucks the now empty plastic bottle into the bin. Then they do it again… and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. A busy café can easily go through thirty plastic milk bottles before lunch. Our favourite cafes all look different but, at the end of the day, their bins look the same. Australia uses over 500 million single-use plastic milk bottles every year. We’ve lived like this for decades, but why?

A Tasmanian café owner looked at the pile of plastic milk bottles in his bins and ended up with one of those ideas that makes you wonder why everyone isn’t doing it already. The Udder Way delivers 18-litre reusable kegs, designed to be roughly the size of a standard milk crate so they fit into existing delivery trucks and cool rooms. A keg is stored in the cool room, gets connected to a tap, and dispenses milk. When it’s empty, it works just like a keg in the pub. It goes back, gets cleaned, gets refilled and gets returned.

It isn’t just for cafés either. Anywhere that milk goes in volume, like schools, supermarkets, hospitals and work sites, can make the switch. It’s also available in grocery stores so households can use refillable milk bottles and ditch the single-use plastic.

The kegs are manufactured in-house in a solar-powered warehouse using Australia’s first electric rotational moulding oven to reduce energy usage. Even the pallets its kegs travel on are wrapped in reusable pallet wrap. This is not a company that solved one problem and called it a day.

Nine two-litre plastic milk bottles are saved every single time one of the kegs gets reused. Since its launch, The Udder Way’s data estimates over 4.5 million single-use plastic milk bottles have been replaced with its reusable kegs, avoiding more than 246,000 kilograms of plastic waste. Best of all, this simple solution is scalable. They’re on track to avoid another 1.7 million milk bottles in 2026.

The less plastic that gets produced, the less plastic ends up polluting our environment. The Udder Way’s solution turns down the plastic tap by turning on the milk tap. Now we need strong national packaging laws so innovative Australian reuse businesses like The Udder Way can thrive and scale.

The Castaway Unpackit Award: Mentos (Perfetti Van Melle)

The Castaway Unpackit Award goes to Mentos and the company behind it, Perfetti Van Melle, for their individually wrapped mints. Individually wrapped Mentos mints are becoming an all-too-familiar feature of Australia’s footpaths, gutters and environment. One nominator said they “often find plastic Mentos wrappers as litter in my neighbourhood and at the beach”.

They’re one of the most ubiquitous pieces of plastic pollution across Australia, despite being entirely unnecessary.

The wrappers are soft plastic, lightweight, and handed out in exactly the settings where on-the-go littering is most likely – places like restaurant counters, hotel lobbies and conference tables. Customers unwrap them as they walk out the door and, before you know it, the tiny wrapper is gone. Into a pocket that gets turned out later. Onto a table it gets left behind on. Into the air and down the drain. It’s making Australia’s environment pay the price for a bit of extra branding.

Australia has no national packaging laws requiring companies like Perfetti Van Melle to take responsibility for where their packaging ends up. It’s no surprise then that soft plastics, including food wrappers, are the most commonly collected litter item in Australia. Strong national packaging laws should ban single-use plastic packaging that is re-wrapped in more plastic, and take us back to the solutions that worked for generations – a bowl and some tongs, with no wrapper required.

The Nature Had It Covered Unpackit Award: Supermarket Avocados

The Nature Had It Covered Unpackit Award goes to ALDI, Coles and Woolworths for wrapping avocados in unnecessary plastic netting that can shed microplastics. Nature already wraps avocados in their own perfectly functional skin. Yet the big supermarkets are wrapping avocados in unnecessary plastic netting that can scatter microplastics when opened. The tiny microplastics end up going down the drain and into our waterways where they’re impossibly small to recover.

Too often, Australians are left without a choice to avoid the unnecessary plastic on their groceries. One nominator said “I hate myself for buying produce in net bags but often there is no choice, so I do”.

Plastic-wrapped avocados are just one part of a bigger problem of plastic flooding into supermarket shelves. Over recent years, products that had always been sold loose and unpackaged have been quietly wrapped up in more and more unnecessary packaging. Almost half of all nominations received by the Unpackit Awards this year were for products sold on supermarket shelves. That is not a coincidence, that is a pattern.

The fix is not complicated. Sell it loose, the way it grew. But because Australia doesn’t have national packaging laws, there’s nothing preventing the big supermarkets from continuing to wrap groceries like avocados in unnecessary packaging. National packaging laws, if implemented, could include design standards that require packaging to serve a functional purpose that the product cannot already serve itself.

The Iceberg Unpackit Award: Kmart Anko Dumbbell Set

The Iceberg Unpackit Award goes to Kmart for its Anko Dumbbell Set that hides ludicrously unnecessary plastic packaging beneath the surface of a weights carry case.

Kmart’s Anko product line is one of the most purchased in Australia. The Kmart Anko Dumbbell Set comes in a hard protective plastic case. Open the case and you’ll find every individual weight plate wrapped in its own plastic bag. Hidden soft plastic bags to ‘protect’ heavy, durable weights. One nominator asked: “Why do weights, of all things, need to be protected in plastic bags?… Who told the manufacturers that this is what Aussies want?”.

There is currently no legal limit on how much packaging a product can include, no requirement for packaging to serve a functional purpose, and no requirement to disclose hidden packaging that many Australians would want to avoid. Until we have strong national packaging laws, plastic will keep piling up where no one can see it.

The Blue Whale Unpackit Award: Bearhug

The Blue Whale Unpackit Award goes to Bearhug for reducing one of the biggest, yet elusive, sources of unnecessary packaging with its reusable pallet wrap system.

Bearhug is doing the hard work where no one is watching. It was founded by a Sydney truck driver who watched every pallet of goods being wrapped in single-use plastic stretch film. While the pallets themselves are usually reused, the plastic wrap then gets cut off and goes in the bin. In just about every supply chain across the country, this plastic accumulates invisibly out the back of warehouses.

Each of Bearhug’s reusable pallet wraps lasts 1,000 uses and displaces 350 kilograms of single-use plastic over its lifetime. It is faster, stronger, and cheaper per use than what it replaces. It is already in use across 140+ businesses and is now launching in Europe.

The Australian-led solutions to unnecessary packaging are here, but they need new national packaging laws to even the playing field. Australia’s promised reforms to national packaging laws must extend producer responsibility into supply chains.

The Hermit Crab Unpackit Award: Cercle

The Hermit Crab Unpackit Award goes to Cercle for making reuse the default, not the exception, for the fuel that really powers Australia – our humble coffee.

A hermit crab doesn’t make its shell – it finds one, uses it, and when the time comes, passes it on for another hermit crab to use. That’s exactly what Cercle had in mind.

Australians drink over one billion takeaway coffees a year. Almost every cup is single-use, consisting of plastic-lined paper that gets used for mere minutes and then binned.

Cercle cups sit at the café counter alongside regular cups. You order, drink, and drop the cup into a nearby pod. Cercle collects, washes, and returns them. The cup says it all: Drink it. Drop it. Do it again.

Each stainless steel cup is built to last 10,000 uses. Since its launch, Cercle’s data estimates over 1.5 million single-use items have been avoided thanks to its reusable cups, saving our landfills and environment from 39.5 tonnes of unnecessary waste.

Cercle has built a reuse system that works, but scaling up relies on gradual voluntary uptake. We need national packaging laws to mandate that venues offer reusable options where a proven solution exists, so that Australian reuse systems like Cercle’s can replace single-use packaging in more venues and new areas.