Shownotes:

** Please note - there is a slight echo during the asking of questions. We apologise for this issue in this episode.

In this episode of the Social Lights Podcast, podcast host and Social Mediology founder Kate vanderVoort shares a conversation with Darren Lomman, founder of Greenbatch.

ABOUT DARREN and GREENBATCH

As a child, Darren was a tinkerer. He liked to pull toys apart, and wanted to see what was inside and how things worked. Naturally, he took up

Engineering at the University of Western Australia. Darren’s ultimate goal was to do good in the world. After dedicating 15 years of his life to building a company that focused on building gear for individuals with disabilities, Darren searched for a new problem to solve.

In December 2016, Darren saw an advertisement for reusable shopping bags, which stated that in 2050, there would be more plastic in the ocean than fish. After researching on plastics and plastics and the ocean, he knew he wanted to a make a positive impact.

In his research, Darren found photos of rivers in China and all throughout Southeast Asia full of plastic. Darren then wanted to look into Australia’s own recycling system, initially planning to study how their recycling system worked to teach those in Southeast Asia. However, he was surprised to find out that there weren’t too many reprocessing facilities in Australia. “We can be doing better than this,” Darren thought to himself. He then put his hand up to see what he could to do tackle this problem in Australia. He established Greenbatch, the first plastics reprocessing plant in Western Australia.

BIG IDEA 1

“That bin which we call a recycling bin should really be called a recycLABLES bin.” (6:52)

Not everything that goes into the recycling bin at home gets recycled. A truck comes along to take your recyclables to a material recovery facility—and these companies call themselves recyclers. They will comb through your stuff and sort them out—paper, cardboard, glass, metal, different kinds of plastics. That’s where their job finishes. They move the materials somewhere else.

Reprocessing is the next step after sorting, but locally, no one has invested the time, effort, and money to do the next step. As a result, these recyclable materials get put on a ship and sent to China, where about 50-75% of the world’s recycled plastics was being shipped to. However, China has since banned the import of waste plastic into their country, and recycling industries have had to look for somewhere else to send these materials.

For every 100 pieces of plastic, only nine will get recovered, sorted in a facility, and end up reprocessed into a new product—91 will not. Unfortunately, there are only three places that plastics not recycled will end up—land, water, and air. Land refers to legal dumping or landfilling, or illegal dumping through littering. It will end up in our water—In rivers and oceans. In the air, it’s through wasted incinerations.

BIG IDEA 2

“A Container Deposit Scheme is not actually a recycling program. It’s an anti-litter program.” (13: 57)

With the Buy Back Scheme, 10 cents is paid per bottle—and these bottles are sent offshore. South Australia, for instance, has had a Container Deposit Scheme for 40 years, yet no one bothered to build a reprocessing plant in South Australia. They were putting on ships and sending them overseas as well.

Container Deposit Schemes are designed so that people will pick up the litter and get it off the street. If you look closely, certain bottles are eligible, and certain are not. Milk bottles and wine bottles, which can be recycled, are not eligible. That’s because you won’t usually see a milk or wine bottle on the street.

According to Darren, “The eligibility was derived from a litter order back in the 1970s, and we have maintained the same eligibility. If it was a true recycling program, why would we stop at just certain beverage bottles? Why not make all beverage bottles have a 10-cent deposit on it?”

BIG IDEA 3

"The design of our system has other things in mind.” (16:06)

People don’t really think about their waste too much once it leaves their hands. When a consumer is holding a bottle in his hand, he is choosing how to dispose of it. He is choosing whether to litter on the street, put it in a landfill bin, or put it into recycling. The current PET collection rate is only 16% across Australia. 

Plastic is actually a really useful material. It takes less energy to recycle plastic than to recycle glass. “We need to teach people that this plastic is not rubbish, it’s not waste—it’s actually a resource.” (18:48)

Episode Links

You can find Darren Lomman and more about Greenbatch at:

·    https://www.facebook.com/greenbatch/

·    https://www.instagram.com/greenbatch/

·    https://www.greenbatch.com/

Keep listening to the upcoming episodes of podcasts by joining in Social Lights Podcast produced by Social Mediology.

You can connect with us on Facebook at @SocialLightsPodcast and find future episodes at socialmediology.com.au/sociallights.

Thanks for your time and stay inspired,

Kate vanderVoort