In November, we discovered that much of the soft plastic we dropped off at supermarkets for recycling – shopping bags, wrappers, food packaging and the like – was not being recycled at all. Instead of being made into road bollards, outdoor furniture and rubbery footpaths, as we had believed, it was simply shoved into vast warehouses and forgotten about.

Environmental investigators have since discovered at least 12,000 tonnes of the stuff in stockpiles across three states – enough to fill 1000 semi-trailer trucks. Much, perhaps all, will end up in landfill. The NSW environmental regulator has already ordered that more than 5200 tonnes be cleared out of storage, where it is deemed a fire risk.

The collapse of the scheme, which so many Australians had diligently supported, is clearly a major setback in our efforts to do something about the enormous quantities of plastic waste we generate every year.

Not only does it mean thousands of tonnes of the stuff will no longer be recycled, this failure has damaged our trust in the entire system of waste management. Why should we bother collecting, sorting, and putting everything in the correct bin if it all just goes to landfill anyway?

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REDcycle, the Melbourne company responsible for gathering the waste in the first place, has much to answer for, particularly its decision to keep collecting and storing plastics even after its third-party recyclers said they could no longer process them.

This is a wake-up call. At the very least, this episode has demonstrated in the most graphic terms just how much soft plastic we use, and have to dispose of, month after month: enormous piles that you quickly start measuring in terms of Olympic swimming pools. Once, we sent it to China: out of sight, out of mind (China banned imports of recyclables in 2018). Now it threatens to overwhelm us.

Of the 2.5 million tonnes of all plastic waste we generated in 2018-2019, only 9 per cent was sent for recycling, according to the ABS, and much of that, as we know, would have ended up in landfill anyway. Households were the largest contributors, generating 1.2 million tonnes of plastic waste – nearly 50 kilograms for every Australian, or enough to fill 100,000 semi-trailers.

We have, or will have, the technology to deal with at least some of it: the $6 billion waste management group Cleanaway says it will make a decision later this year on a plan to collect 100,000 tonnes of soft plastics a year. Melbourne-based packaging company Amcor also recently announced plans for a new recycling plant.