Nov 65 min read

Belrose Welcomes New Recycling Hub by Pittwater Eco Adventures: Repurposing Plastics for a Greener Future

By ALEC SMART

A new recycling hub repurposing waste plastics has opened in Belrose, run by community social enterprise Pittwater Eco Adventures.

In addition to providing education on better waste management, useful items are made from refuse plastic. Neighbourhood Media chats with the Belrose Recycling Hub founder, Katie Brooks.

We have council recycling bins, why set up a centre to repurpose waste plastics?

On average only 9% of plastics are recycled globally. In Australia it’s a bit higher - sitting at 12%. - while paper, aluminium and glass have much higher recycling rates.

The reasons for this: 1) Contamination - a little bit of contamination is ok, but once it reaches a certain threshold, contaminated waste gets sent to landfills.

2) Size - anything smaller than a credit card is too small for the industrial machinery.

3) No resin codes - it’s not a manufacturing requirement in Australia to label plastics. It’s best practice but lots of companies don’t bother. A polymer identification code is the recycling symbol with a number in it. If it’s not labelled it may not end up getting recycled.

To make it even more confusing, recycling varies from place to place around the country. Eg. the soft plastics debacle.

Can you tell us how the Belrose facility came about?

It's like a community recycling hub, a place for reshaping waste, now that we're doing a lot more school workshops... We used to just operate as a mobile initiative, going to schools and driving into the playground to set up a recycling workshop, or setting up a stall at public events, but we’ve found we need to have a base.

Now that we've got the Belrose warehouse, we can concentrate more on making stuff... and invite people to the hub for workshops as well. From here we can do a lot more community engagement.

Pittwater Eco Adventures plastic recycling

Does this involve educating people about which plastics can be repurposed?

Yes, exactly. We work with polyethylene, which is the safest plastic to work with because it's got a really low melting temperature, so it's difficult to burn. There aren't many associated fumes either.

A lot of councils won’t recycle plastic objects if they’re smaller than a credit card, they just goes straight to landfill. Their machinery is too big to deal with anything small.

So we focus on little things like sushi fish sauce containers and bottle caps, because, A): they're easy to motivate the community into collecting, and, B): they can't be recycled in the yellow bins no matter where you live, because they're so small.

The plastic is shredded and placed into moulds where it is melted into new products, is that correct?

The machinery we have been working with previously is for benchtop use, mostly suitable for public festivals and visiting schools, so we are limited in what we can make in terms of size. When we're doing demonstrations, everybody gets to make a pen or a hair comb or something that they can keep that's basically pocket-sized.

At the Belrose warehouse, we’re scaling that up, which will also enable us to keep up with bigger volumes of waste. We have different machinery to produce larger items - an injection machine, a big shredder, and a sheet press so we can make melted sheets of plastic.

In the future, we’ll be getting a CNC router so we could potentially cut furniture, or all sorts of objects - the sky's the limit, really!

Are people encouraged to take waste plastic items to your Belrose warehouse for recycling?

That's definitely encouraged. But we’ll be working to set up collection bins, which will be stationed in a number of locations across the Northern Beaches and the North Shore. Volunteers within the community will collect the bins in their suburb, and ensure quality control. And then we can rely upon 10 people across both of those areas bringing the plastic waste to us, rather than 3000 community members rocking up on our doorstep…

Community recycling is fraught with issues around contamination, it’s very labour intensive washing and sorting it all. We think we’ve come up with a solution to this bottleneck with installing the program in schools. These things are written into the curriculum at almost all stages of primary and high school education. Kids are sitting in classrooms learning about plastics and recycling, we figure they might as well be helping us do it!

By collecting these items through schools, we have the means of controlling the quality of the donations we receive. Students are learning about plastics while sorting them by colour and type, and we’re coming into their schools to show them what we can do with it. We’ve even been working with engineers and designers to bring to market machinery for schools to do the recycling themselves.

In the meantime…?

We want to try, as much as possible, to do it through schools, because they've got the capacity to store the plastic waste, as well as clean and sort it for us. But community members will have local drop-off points they can go to, such as libraries or council chambers.

The call to action at this point is to follow the project on Instagram and Facebook - Pittwater Eco Adventures and Reshaping Waste. Also, sign up for our newsletter!

Who are Pittwater Eco Adventures? Run by dedicated environmentalists Katie Brooks and Bergia Kalmar is a multi-faceted operation. Based in the Pittwater YHA on the shores of Morning Bay in Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park, they host a range of environmentally-themed activities and workshops including youth camps and corporate retreats.

These include half or full-day adventures involving bushwalking, kayaking, stand-up paddle-boarding and yoga. They also manage Duke of Edinburgh programs for Sydney schools and teach bush regeneration and Aboriginal stewardship of the land.

Since June 2020, they’ve hosted regular community clean-ups at Manly Cove, in which waste plastics are sifted from the sand and shoreline and, where possible, ground up and recycled. In mid-2023 they launched a recycling project called Reshaping Waste, and regularly visit schools, markets and community festivals to encourage re-using waste plastics.

In a 2023 interview Katie told me, “We bought some machinery and set up a little mobile workshop, which is a small van that we can drive into schools and down to the beach.

“We host events in the Manly area. Basically, we rock up, run a beach clean-up, sort through all the different streams of waste that can be recycled, like sushi fish [soy sauce packets], straws and bottle caps, and then we’ll shred it all down.

“And we’ll get the people at those events to recycle on the spot – turn the waste they find into products that they can take home… One of the reasons we run the events at Manly Cove is because it’s in the top five most polluted beaches in Australia for microplastics!”