How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter? RecycleSmart’s plastic recycling for Sydney councils – Australia
Posted on February 2, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingRecycling specialist RecycleSmart is starting a soft plastic recycling solution for residents in four councils in Sydney.
Launched in 2019, the Sydney-based startup collects tricky-to-recycle items, such as soft plastics, clothing, e-waste and more from residents’ homes and drops the items off to be recycled. The Power Pickup service is available in 16 councils.
Since the loss of the widespread soft plastics recycling scheme three months ago, the team could not just sit and wait…
“We know that we are not solving the national soft plastics crisis, but at RecycleSmart, we are all about testing new solutions quickly and having an impact, like the 400 tonnes of resources we have kept in circulation to date. Also, we believe that speed is of paramount importance to ensure people don’t lose the healthy habit of recycling their soft plastics, so we wanted to act fast,” says Giorgio Baracchi, CEO and co-founder of RecycleSmart.
Read more: Plastics ban comes into effect
The soft plastics will be taken to the APR Plastics facility in Victoria. Once shredded, it will be fed into a machine using pyrolysis (elevated temperatures with no oxygen). Manufactured in Germany, the self-sufficient and zero-waste system is a first of its kind in Australia. The oil will then be sold to VIVA ENERGY, to be turned into fuel and eventually flexible plastics again, creating a true circular solution.
“This process ‘plastics to oil’ has been successfully used in Europe for 10 years. It is time for Australia to catch-up and turn the 70 billion pieces of soft scrunchable plastics used here each year into a huge opportunity and build a circular economy,” says Darren Thorpe, Managing Director of APR Plastics.
Currently, this soft plastic recycling initiative is available to four councils: Penrith, Inner West, Burwood and Waverley as of the 30th of January. This is just the beginning. The end goal is to make this service available to all RecycleSmart users as soon as possible.
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