Australia needs national guidelines to tackle confusion about recycling rules, an inquiry has been told.

Clean Up Australia’s CEO Jenny Geddes told a parliamentary inquiry into plastic pollution in the country’s waterways the rules around plastics recycling in Australia need to be clearer to ensure people do it correctly.

“There’s a sentiment that we want to participate in recycling and we believe in it, but we certainly get it wrong quite often,” she said on Friday.

Ms Geddes spoke about the lack of harmonisation of recycling schemes across different locations and called for governments to implement nationally consistent guidelines on plastic recycling.

“It’s very confusing from council to council, from town to town, city to city,” she said.

“One area can have a completely different recycling scheme.”

She said the fragmented nature of plastic recycling made it hard for businesses to understand what types of plastics they should be working with.

“And it doesn’t help consumers to actually want to be part of the solution, not the problem.”

Pointing to the federal government’s National Plastic Plan, Ms Geddes said Australia goes through 70 billion pieces of soft plastic every year – almost 3000 pieces per person.

She referred to Clean Up Australia’s most recent Rubbish Report from 2022 which indicated a seven per cent increase in soft plastics and five per cent in hard plastics recovered from public schools, bushland, creeks, beaches and roads compared to 2021.

The issue of plastic pollution has been exacerbated by the collapse of the RedCycle soft plastic recycling program in November.

“It creates a lack of trust in our recycling efforts,” Ms Geddes said.

There was a noticeable uptick in the number of disposable vapes found by Clean Up Australia Day volunteers this year, she said.

“At the moment, it’s very anecdotal. We’re starting to see that as a real problem and it’s because they’re a single use item and they’re also illegal items.”

Ms Geddes said legal vapes bought from chemists could be taken back to be recycled properly.

“But all the illegal vapes are the ones that are really problematic.”

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to hang over clean up efforts with volunteers still finding enormous amounts of masks and gloves in the environment.

– AAP