By Tim Barlass
A Sydney business is looking to clean up Pacific beaches with a unique recycling process, turning plastic litter into power poles and Frisbees.
While labour-intensive sorting and cleaning makes most recycling processes financially unviable, a new pilot, developed by Brookvale firm Talon, shreds and melts down mixed plastics, meaning any collected materials can be used.
Talon’s chief executive Geoff Germon.Credit: Louie Douvis
Geoff Germon, an adjunct professor of design at Canberra University and Talon’s chief executive, said the system was an opportunity to remove and reuse vast quantities of plastic littering Pacific beaches.
Talon opened a micro-processing plant in Fiji last month.
Known as the LPM Project, and supported by the University of Southern Queensland and the British government, its process breaks down mixed plastics into shreds just a few centimetres in size.
Those shreds are “consolidated” using heat and pressure into a large mass or matrix that can be pressed into a shape. Early trials on plastics collected from Fiji have included power poles, dog bowls and Frisbees.
Sam Melrose and university intern Lily Bilston showing how a toy truck containing a cocktail of different plastics can be shredded and reused. Credit: Louie Douvis
The matrix is covered with a laminated fabric layer made of cotton and recycled plastic bags to make it stronger and more marketable.
“Conventionally, you would have to sort waste into polyethylenes and polypropylenes, which are the common packaging plastics,” Germon said.
“Then you might have some car parts, which are ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) and some polycarbonates and some PT (Polyethylene terephthalate), which is all the clear plastic bags and bottles.”
Germon said those processes meant that at present only about 13 per cent of materials were recycled.
Sydney plastics recycling firm Talon has opened a micro-processing plant near Suva in Fiji.Credit:
“Everything else goes to landfill,” he said.
“We collected 220 kilos from a one-kilometre beach; it took about 40 kids an hour to do it, but then it would be a full day of sorting it with people who know what they are doing. It’s not viable.”
Lead project manager Sam Melrose said their process could manage the several different types of plastic in, for example, a discarded swimming pool filter.
Stages of the process from shredded plastic (left), composite matrix bowl (multicoloured, top), laminated fabric and finished bowl (right).Credit: Louie Douvis
“It all goes in the shredder, and we use the material that comes out. Even if the item has a paper label on it, it doesn’t affect us.”
Canberra University industrial design students were presented with the raw recycled material. Lily Bilston, now an intern at Talon, devised a fence post system, while others designed vertical gardens to be used alongside motorways and a module for artificial reefs.
Fiji’s Centre of Appropriate Technology and Development is training workers for the project.
The centre’s director, Aporosa Silatolu, said the technology would “make a significant difference to the wellbeing of Fijians, particularly those in rural communities”.
A recycled pole manufacted from plastic waste on Fiji.
Germon said Talon wanted to make big, heavy and thick products to use up large amounts of plastic, with street poles the current focus.
“We are making things that replace steel or concrete,” he said.
“The mission is about trying to suck the plastic out of the community. We have got the tech solution and enough marketing to show it has potential, we don’t necessarily have the skill set to take it to a global level.”
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