Give money, time, or the plastic you already have.

Give money

Donate to research and established organisations

Two kinds of organisation are worth your money: the ones writing and defending the rules (Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), ClientEarth, Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Beyond Plastics, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), the Australian Marine Conservation Society, Boomerang Alliance, Surfers Against Sewage, Plastic Soup Foundation), and the ones producing the evidence those rules rest on (Plymouth Marine Laboratory, the University of Plymouth’s marine litter unit, Australian Microplastic Assessment Project (AUSMAP), Tangaroa Blue’s debris database, the Sydney Institute of Marine Science). Clean-up technology such as The Ocean Cleanup is a reasonable third choice if you want to see plastic physically removed; it treats the symptom, and its own scientists say so.

Three things we found while checking. Several well-known names are not charities: Plastic Bank is a for-profit company, Common Seas is a UK community interest company, and Precious Plastic does not publish a registration, so gifts to them are not tax-deductible anywhere. Some cannot take your money at all: Minderoo Foundation and its Minderoo-Monaco Commission are family-funded and have no donation channel, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)’s Ending Plastic Waste mission has no public giving page, and the Seabin Foundation now states it no longer receives donations. Its accounts for the year to June 2025 were drawn up on the basis that it may stop trading within 12 months, so check it is still running before you volunteer. The Seabin devices are sold by Seabin Pty Ltd, a separate for-profit company. And Break Free From Plastic, the movement most people have heard of, has no donate page; join it, run a brand audit, and fund one of its member organisations instead.

For university research (Scripps, Utrecht, VU Amsterdam and others), a directed gift is usually possible but no dedicated plastics fund exists; email the development office and name the lab. Where an entry says “DGR” (deductible gift recipient), “501(c)(3)” or gives a UK charity number, we saw it on the organisation’s own site or the relevant register.

Give time

Volunteer, clean up, and do citizen science

The most useful hour you can give is one that produces data or a decision. A beach clean where every item is counted (International Coastal Cleanup, Great British Beach Clean, Sea Shepherd’s Marine Debris Campaign, Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI) in Australia) turns litter into evidence that councils and ministers use. A brand audit turns the same litter into a named list of polluters. A week of counting your own packaging (The Big Plastic Count) produced the figure that 59% of UK household plastic is burnt.

If you have professional skills, small plastics non-governmental organisations (NGOs) need them more than they need another pair of hands on a beach: bookkeeping, translation, legal drafting, data analysis, design. Reach Volunteering (UK), Catchafire and Idealist (US and global) and SEEK Volunteer or GoVolunteer (Australia) list those roles. Repair Cafes need fixers. Boomerang Bags needs sewers, though check your local group is still active.

Two programmes people ask about no longer exist as volunteer routes: 5 Gyres’ TrawlShare has been retired, and Plastic Soup Foundation has no volunteer programme in 2026, only a paid internship. Both remain good places to send money.

Citizen science that feeds real research

Hand in your plastic

Drop-off points and return schemes

Every drop-off scheme on this page is listed with what actually happens to the material, because that is the question the bins never answer. The short version: deposit-return containers are the one stream that reliably becomes new containers, because they are clean and single-material. Almost everything else is downcycled once (into boards, benches, fence posts, asphalt additive, fuel pellets) and then it is done. Soft plastics in particular have a poor record: REDcycle stockpiled 11,000 tonnes before collapsing in 2022; a 2024 tracker study found 70% of UK supermarket soft-plastic bundles that reached a final site were burnt; and a 2023 US investigation found most store drop-off bags went to landfill or overseas.

That is not a reason to stop returning things. It is a reason to return the right things (deposit containers, e-waste, batteries, blister packs, phones) and to stop buying the things that only have a downcycling route. Reduction beats recycling every time; the entries below are for what is left.

What to do with your plastic: Australia, September 2026

Work down the list. Stop at the first step that applies.

1. Reduce. If you would have to drive it somewhere to get rid of it, do not buy it next time. Soft plastics, coffee pods, blister packs and single-use cutlery are the usual culprits. Bulk and refill shops are mapped by Reusable Nation.
2. Reuse. Containers, jars, bags and bottles. Op shops (Vinnies, Salvos) take clean goods and sell them; buying second-hand is the cheapest way to avoid new plastic in things.
3. Repair. About 110 Repair Cafes run across Australia; find one on the community map linked in the directory.
4. Return for a refund. Every state and territory now has a 10-cent container deposit scheme (Tasmania’s Recycle Rewards launched 1 May 2025). Wine and spirit bottles are already included in Queensland and, from 1 July 2026, in Western Australia (WA) and the Northern Territory (NT); New South Wales (NSW), the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and South Australia (SA) add them in 2027. Refunds can be donated to a charity at the machine.
5. Drop off. Soft plastics: Coles, Woolworths and Aldi bins under Soft Plastic Stewardship Australia, now at 700-plus stores in Sydney, Melbourne, south-east Queensland, Canberra and (since May 2026) Adelaide; not yet in Perth or Tasmania. The material is mechanically recycled into benches and building board or goes to trial plants that use heat to break it down into oil (chemical recycling), not yet back into food packaging. A 2026 trial did make seven million KitKat wrappers from recycled plastic oil, but the oil was imported because there is not yet enough local supply (Hydrocarbon Processing, August 2026). A few NSW councils (Newcastle, Central Coast, Tamworth) offer Curby bags in the yellow bin, and nine councils in NSW, Victoria and SA have Soft Plastics Stewardship Australia (SPSA) kerbside pilots. RecycleSmart will collect from your door for a fee. E-waste goes free to any National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme site; blister packs to a Pharmacycle pharmacy; phones to MobileMuster; batteries to B-cycle bins at supermarkets. Bread tags: the wheelchair programme stopped taking them in August 2026. Lids: Lids4Kids has no drop-off points any more; leave lids on deposit containers instead. The Colgate toothbrush programme closes on 30 December 2026.
6. Bin it. Anything that does not fit above goes in the red bin. In most of Australia that means landfill. It is not a failure on your part; it is what the packaging was designed for.

Check your council’s rules first at Recycling Near You (recyclingnearyou.com.au/), because kerbside lists differ suburb by suburb.

Other ways

Use your voice, your vote and your money

Some of the strongest levers are not on the usual lists. If you hold shares, directly or through a pension (superannuation in Australia), As You Sow’s resolutions at Coca-Cola, Nestle, PepsiCo and Unilever are on the ballot every year; vote for them. If you have a bank account or pension fund, Market Forces (Australia) and Bank.Green (international) will tell you whether it finances the oil and gas that plastic is made from; note honestly that neither tool scores plastics or petrochemicals specifically, and that the UK’s Make My Money Matter closed in 2025. If you run a cafe, a school or a council, Plastic Free Places (Australia) and Plastic Free Communities (UK) give you a step-by-step programme and a public certificate at the end.

Petitions work when they have a named target and a report behind them. The Australian Marine Conservation Society and Boomerang Alliance petition to Woolworths, Coles, ALDI and Metcash qualifies; it was 7,861 signatures short of 10,000 when we checked. Letters work when they are short, specific and in your own words. Three things are being decided right now: Australia’s national packaging regulation and NSW’s Plastics Plan 2.0 legislation in 2026, the UK deposit scheme’s rules before its October 2027 launch, and the Global Plastics Treaty, which resumed under a new chair in February 2026 after the Geneva round ended without a text. Find your representative in the directory.