In 2017-18, only six per cent of Australian soft plastic waste was recycled. The rest added to the growing mountain of plastic in landfills around the country. The biggest problem is the lack of an automatic solution to sort soft plastic waste from co-mingled recycling. Vucetic, an Engineers Australia Fellow, explained that this is because soft plastics like bread bags and cling wrap get tangled in machinery, causing equipment failures and contaminating other waste streams. Sydney-based recycling provider iQRenew invited Vucetic's team at the University of Sydney's Centre for IoT and Telecommunications to see the problem first hand, and potentially help them automate their processes.

In a move to increase soft plastics recycling, engineering researchers at the University of Sydney are creating a smart, automated robotic system that uses artificial intelligence to sort recyclable waste. Soft plastics lack adequate recycling methods because they easily entangle in waste-separation machinery, which often leads to mechanical failure and contamination of other recyclable materials such as paper. Because of this problem, current recycling methods rely on the manual sorting of soft plastics. Despite an improvement in plastic recycling in recent years, landfill is a growing issue. Soft plastics like cling wrap and plastic bags are a major contributor to the problem, with 94% going to landfill in 2016–17.