On this page
Australasian Recycling Label
Status
Voluntary, privately administered, used in Australia and New Zealand. The ARL is an APCO-member trademark. It is not a statutory Recycle / Do Not Recycle label in either country. PREP assessment is a condition of on-pack use. An Australian classification is not a New Zealand classification. The paused Australian Design for Kerbside Recyclability Grading Framework, as of the Australia report’s March 2026 note, is not this scheme and is not in regulations.
Recyclable · Conditionally Recyclable · Not RecyclablePrescribed or scheme wording — not production artwork
PREP before on-packPrescribed or scheme wording — not production artwork
Wording lock-ups and sourced marks are for identification and commentary. They are not production artwork.
Role and legal character
APCO’s own FAQ states the threshold facts. Access to the ARL Program is exclusive to members of the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation. The ARL is a trademarked logo. “At this time, the Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) program is a voluntary program available to APCO Members.” Only once a business has conducted a PREP assessment can the ARL be used on-pack. Those four sentences are the legal character of the scheme. They are not an Australian or New Zealand packaging offence.
The Australia country report records the co-regulatory shell: NEPM and the Covenant bind brand owners at or above the turnover threshold to stewardship and reporting, not to printing ARL. New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment supports the label and the Recycling Leadership Forum has managed New Zealand input since February 2025; the Waste Minimisation Act does not make ARL universal. Retailer specifications can make ARL contractually unavoidable. That remains contract, not statute.
The three states
PREP classifies each separable component as recyclable, conditionally recyclable, or not recyclable in the Australian or New Zealand resource-recovery system against which the evaluation was run. DCCEEW’s consumer-facing restatement of the on-pack grammar is the one this article uses for the three states. Recyclable: the component goes in the recycling bin. Conditionally Recyclable: the clear recycling symbol means the consumer must follow the instruction under the symbol; if they do not, the component goes in the rubbish, otherwise it contaminates the stream. Not Recyclable: the bin symbol means the component is not recyclable and must not be placed in the recycling bin.
That middle state is the scheme’s distinctive legal object. Theme 3’s comparing-schemes article sets it against OPRL’s binary and How2Recycle’s access tiers. This page is the Theme 2 consequence: a printer who copies an OPRL Recycle onto an Australasian SKU, or who copies an Australian Recyclable onto a New Zealand SKU, has printed a proposition the PREP file does not support.
Australia is not New Zealand
PREP “simulates the Australian and New Zealand kerbside recycling system (infrastructure and processes).” That is two simulations. Kerbside acceptance, reprocessing and the soft-plastics collapse are not identical. APCO’s user guide treats CDS-eligible containers in Australia as an integrated ARL variant; New Zealand’s container-return scheme remains deferred since March 2023. An ARL lock-up generated for one market is not a translation of the other.
The Australia report’s March 2026 DCCEEW note still stands here: the Design for Kerbside Recyclability Grading Framework was being tested and was not in regulations. It is not a stealth mandate for ARL, and ARL is not that framework.
Artwork rules
Members who have signed the PREP and ARL terms access artwork files in the member centre. Required dimensions live in the ARL Program User Guide (March 2023 edition located; later member-only updates are not restated here as if they were public statute). This article does not quote millimetre figures from a member PDF. Embossing, micro-ARL and combined micro-ARL are scheme options described in that guide’s version history; they are not created by the NEPM.
CDS wording in Australian states — “10c refund at collection depots/points in participating State/Territory of purchase” — is a different legal object, treated in the deposit gallery. The ARL does not replace it, and it does not replace the ARL.
Traps
The first trap is treating ARL omission as a packaging offence. The second is a trans-Tasman SKU with one PREP file. The third is using ARL Recyclable as a defence to an ACCC or Commerce Commission claim about a different sentence on the same pack — ocean plastic, carbon-neutral, compostable. The fourth is reading a 2026 Australian mandatory-design consultation as if it had already made ARL the law.
Primary sources
APCO. ARL Program FAQs: voluntary, member-only, PREP before on-pack, trademark. Open source
DCCEEW. Australasian Recycling Label — consumer-facing three states. Open source
Ministry for the Environment (NZ). The Australasian Recycling Label in New Zealand, updated 27 May 2026. Open source
APCO. ARL Program User Guide, March 2023 (member artwork rules; not quoted as millimetre statute). Open source
Note on sources and verification
This page replaces the regional overview that previously sat at this URL and was folded into the Australia and New Zealand reports. It is the scheme article those reports cross-refer, analogous to the OPRL article. No millimetre figure is taken from a member-only PDF. Last verified: 23 August 2026.