Plastic Scrap
With metal, mixing grades usually just means a lower blended price. With plastic, mixing the wrong resins together can make the whole batch genuinely unusable rather than just less valuable. Here's what separates the three real plastic grades and why getting the sort right matters so much more than it does for metal.
Clear PET drink bottles, baled. The most recognisable recyclable plastic, and the one most likely to have a container deposit alternative worth checking first.
Natural (uncoloured) HDPE containers, milk bottles and similar, clean. Natural HDPE holds more value than coloured HDPE for reprocessing reasons.
Sorted mixed post-consumer plastics that don't separate cleanly into PET or HDPE, the lowest-value grade of the three.
PET generally holds the most value of the three, it's the most widely recycled plastic in Australia and manufacturers actively want clean, sorted PET back for new bottles and packaging. Natural HDPE sits close behind, valuable specifically because it can be reprocessed into almost any colour. Mixed plastic, sorted but not separated by resin, sits at the bottom of the three, still genuinely valuable, just requiring more processing before a buyer can use it directly.
Different plastic resins are chemically incompatible when melted together, genuinely different polymer structures that don't bond into a usable material when mixed. That's a real difference from metal, where a mixed load usually just prices down toward the lower grade rather than becoming unusable. Most packaging carries a resin identification code, a small numbered triangle, that makes sorting straightforward once you know to look for it. In practice, this means a genuinely mixed-resin load without any sorting gets valued at the lowest applicable rate, or refused outright by some buyers, rather than simply being discounted the way a mixed metal load would be.
PET drink bottles specifically overlap with something else worth knowing about: every Australian state and territory now runs a container deposit scheme paying 10 cents per eligible container, and PET bottles are core to every one of those schemes. For a normal household or small collection quantity, that per-container refund beats bulk scrap pricing by a wide margin, there's no reason to bale a handful of bottles for scrap when the deposit point pays more per bottle.
ScrapTrade's plastic categories are genuinely built for a different scale entirely, collection point operators, recycling businesses, and anyone consolidating volume well beyond household quantities. HDPE and mixed plastic don't have the same container-deposit overlap since most of that material comes from products outside the deposit schemes, but the same "genuine bulk volume" principle applies across all three grades, this isn't the right tool for a single recycling bin's worth of material.
Baling matters for plastic the same way it does for aluminium cans, loose containers are mostly empty space, expensive to transport relative to their actual weight. Baling compresses material into dense, transportable blocks that are genuinely economical to move and process at volume. Rinsing out food or liquid residue before baling protects the value of the load too, contamination affects plastic more directly than it does most metals, since plastic can't simply be melted through the way some metal grades tolerate light surface contamination.
Removing obviously different materials, caps of a different resin, paper labels, metal closures, before baling also helps. None of this needs to be perfect, but a cleaner, better-described load consistently gets a more confident offer than a mixed, undescribed one.
Producing plastic from recycled material uses meaningfully less energy than producing it from raw petrochemical feedstock, and unlike metal, plastic can only be mechanically recycled a limited number of times before the polymer chains degrade too much for further reuse, which makes getting a clean, well-sorted first recycling pass right genuinely more important than it is for materials that can be recycled indefinitely.
That's exactly why resin-specific sorting matters as much as it does throughout this guide, a contaminated or mixed load doesn't just lose value, it can genuinely limit how many more times that plastic gets a useful life before it's no longer recyclable at all.
Different plastic resins are chemically incompatible when melted together, unlike metals, which can sometimes tolerate a degree of mixing. Mixing PET and HDPE in the same melt produces a weak, unusable material, which is exactly why resin-specific sorting matters so much more for plastic than for most metals on this site.
Most plastic packaging carries a resin identification code, a small triangle with a number from 1 to 7, moulded into the base or side. 1 is PET, 2 is HDPE, and the others cover less common plastics that generally fall under mixed plastic for scrap purposes.
For HDPE specifically, yes, natural (uncoloured) HDPE is worth more than coloured HDPE since it can be reprocessed into a wider range of products. For genuinely mixed plastic that isn't sorted by resin at all, colour sorting matters less than getting the resin separation right first.
More so, in some ways. Food residue, labels, and caps of a different resin type all reduce the value of a plastic load, and unlike metal, plastic can't simply be melted through minor contamination the way some metal grades tolerate light coatings. A rinse and a check for stray caps or labels genuinely helps.
Yes, PET, HDPE, and Mixed Plastic are all real, live-priced categories on ScrapTrade's calculator. Each has its own dedicated guide with more detail, linked above.
No, that's a genuine difference worth understanding. Metal can generally be recycled indefinitely without losing quality, plastic's polymer chains degrade with each mechanical recycling pass, giving it a limited number of useful cycles. That's part of why clean, resin-specific sorting matters more for plastic than for most metals.
Recycling and reprocessing businesses operating at genuine volume, similar to the buyer profile for aluminium cans or bulk cardboard. A single household's recycling isn't the target here, kerbside council collection is the more practical path for that scale.
Not fundamentally, the same resin-type and cleanliness principles apply either way. Industrial offcuts are often actually easier to grade accurately since the source and resin type are usually known with certainty, unlike genuinely mixed post-consumer material.
The same principle applies, film and soft plastics are typically a different resin category again (often LDPE) and shouldn't be mixed in with rigid PET, HDPE, or mixed containers. If you're dealing with genuine volume of film or bags specifically, describe it as its own category rather than folding it into a rigid-plastic listing.
Live reference pricing across every grade, updated daily.
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