This Christmas, your festive crayfish meal may be caught in a craypot made from recycled rubbish bin lids, thanks to an innovative collaboration between the City of Cockburn, Western Australia, and local business Green Machines Lab (GML).
Bin lids removed during the City of Cockburn’s third bin rollout are being provided free to Bibra Lake start-up GML which has received a $138,190 Waste Authority Community and Industry Engagement (CIE) grant to establish a pilot plastics recycling facility.
GML is processing up to 6,000 of the City’s recyclable bin lids into plastic granules which are then sold to a local plastics manufacturer to be cleaned and transformed into cray pots for the recreational fishing market.
City of Cockburn Waste Manager, Lyall Davieson, said it was a fantastic step forward in the development of a circular economy in Westralian Australia, allowing the City to recycle and reuse waste products locally.
“It supports targets in the State Government’s Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Strategy 2030 to develop local solutions and markets for recycling.
“As part of its commitment to helping kick start Western Australia’s circular economy, the City of Cockburn provided GML with a $3,661 Sustainability grant in 2018.
“The company that previously recycled the bin lids would send them overseas for processing, so it is great news that the City has partnered with a local company to allow us to reprocess here.
“The bin lids come from the third bin rollout and the upgrade of our dark green lids to red. This helps to ensure consistency of bin colours across the country, so it’s a win-win for everyone.”
GML Managing Director, Shady Novaihed, said reprocessing waste plastic produced about five percent of the carbon dioxide needed to make new virgin material.
“Bans on imports of plastic waste into most Asian nations means we need to move fast,” Mr Novaihed said.
