I'm a concerned person   We are among the highest producers of single-use plastic waste per person in the world, using around 147kg of plastic per person every year. We recycle just 14 per cent of it. The rest goes to landfill, leaches into our waterways, and breaks up into the microplastics now found in our food, our water and our bodies.   In 2018, governments and industry set ambitious national packaging targets to reach by 2025. The deadline has passed and we missed every single target comprehensively.    The lesson is clear: good intentions without infrastructure or enforceability are not enough. Meanwhile, plastic packaging consumption keeps growing and the costs of dealing with the waste fall on the wrong people. Households pay an estimated $70–95 per year through rates and levies just to manage packaging waste, while the producers who place that packaging on the market bear none of the responsibility for it. Recent global events have further sharpened the case for acting.   The plastics Australia throws away are almost entirely derived from imported fossil fuels - oil and gas whose price and supply are vulnerable to geopolitical shocks. Reducing our dependence on virgin plastic and imported packaging is not just an environmental and human health imperative, it is also a supply chain resilience strategy. The solution is well-understood. We already know that mandatory, producer-funded systems work. Container deposit schemes now operating in every state and territory have delivered recycling rates of up to 71 per cent for eligible packaging, measurable reductions in litter, domestic reprocessing capacity and local employment, all without significant cost to consumers.   This is the model that needs to be applied to plastic packaging.