Living with less plastic in Australia

Walk up to almost any bottle shop, service station, or 'return point' depot in Western Australia and you'll find a queue of people feeding empty drink containers into a machine, waiting for a small refund to land in their account. It looks mundane, but it's the visible end of one …

It's easy to miss: a plastic fish barely larger than a thumb, filled with soy sauce, tucked into the corner of a sushi tray or bento box. In September 2025, South Australia became the first jurisdiction anywhere in the world to specifically ban this object - the miniature 'soy sauce …