Ooshies, a small squishy plastic toy figurine, may be small enough to disappear into a child’s pocket, but their return has reopened a far bigger question about the prodigious quantities of plastic passing through Australian supermarkets. Woolworths says this year’s promotion is more circular. The 40-character Disney range, available with every $30 spent, is made from 97 per cent recycled materials, while unwanted Ooshies can be returned to stores for recycling. But although the scheme gives
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Ooshies, a small squishy plastic toy figurine, may be small enough to disappear into a child’s pocket, but their return has reopened a far bigger question about the prodigious quantities of plastic passing through Australian supermarkets.Woolworths says this year’s promotion is more circular. The 40-character Disney range, available with every $30 spent, is made from 97 per cent recycled materials, while unwanted Ooshies can be returned to stores for recycling. But although the scheme gives the toys an afterlife, it does little to explain why so much plastic enters shopping baskets in the first place. Australian supermarkets are a $144.3 billion industry responsible for most household packaging, a gruelling fact given that 1.23 million tonnes of plastic packaging reached end of life in 2023–24. Last year’s supermarket plastics audit by The Australian Marine Conservation Society and Boomerang Alliance made for grim reading – all four major groups failed. Woolworths came out best at 38 per cent, followed by Metcash at 26 per cent, Coles at 19 per cent and Aldi at 14 per cent. It all adds upAfter seeing the Ooshies promotion in store, Sydney reuse organisation Reverse Garbage chief executive Kirsten Junor resorted to a Facebook video, calling on Woolworths to do better and arguing they could be played with for a nano-second before disposal. She later told Inside FMCG that, from her point of view, Ooshies’ recycled plastic makeup adds to the greenwashing rhetoric. “Even though they are recycled materials, they are still made offshore; there are the resources and carbon to make them, the emissions to get them to Australia and then distributed around Australia,” she said, adding that the in-store marketing collateral such as coreflute signage is also single-use. “It all adds up and from the online comments we received the majority of people see them as unnecessary, on many levels.” Junor, a member of Charitable Reuse Australia, says Ooshies burden charity organisations with unwanted toys once the fad fades. The problem before the bin The AMCS audit found reusable and refillable packaging remained minimal from supermarkets – including Woolworths – strategies, while more than half of tested online orders used at least one plastic produce bag for loose fruit or vegetables. That year, Woolworths reported a 3200-tonne reduction in virgin plastic, but the audit cautioned that the figure didn’t demonstrate an overall reduction in plastic use. Recycling showed some progress, but Woolworths, Coles and Aldi went backwards in the heavily weighted plastic-reduction category. It’s also important to note that none of the major retailers has disclosed the total volume of plastic packaging it placed on shelves since Aldi last did so in 2020.The audit’s more prosaic evidence lies among potatoes, apples and oranges. The latter is a useful example of the problem: a fruit already equipped with its own peel can still arrive at the supermarket bundled in plastic netting. In 73 per cent of supermarket surveys conducted by volunteers, loose fresh produce cost more than its pre-packaged equivalent. AMCS plastics campaign manager Cip Hamilton said the pricing “encourages people to buy more packaging and more plastic because they see it’s a cheaper price” she said “Quite often a consumer might go in and want two apples and they’ll see a package that’s got four apples, so they’ll end up buying it because it’s price competitive, so it actually promotes more food waste.”Loyalty collectables are designed to create attachment, and shoppers understand the appeal because they are inevitably part of it; at the same time, they are being asked to recycle more conscientiously while the retail environment continues to place more disposable material in their hands. “We just need to stop the reliance on plastic,” Junor argued. “We can’t recycle our way out of this environmental mess we’re in. And these promotions don’t help; they just create more in a time when we need to be making less and teaching children about environmental responsibility.” Supermarkets therefore have an undeniable responsibility beyond making plastic easier to recycle; they should confront the commercial decisions that produce so much of it in the first place.
