When you put glass bottles and containers in your household recycling bin, due to handling and sorting methods not all materials are actually recycled.

Colmax Glass successfully received Covenant funding to build a state-of-the art facility at Sommersby, NSW, to take this un-recoverable material and turn it into sand for re-use in bottle manufacturing, roads, insulation, water filtration and blasting abrasives. CEO Peter Harkins said: “Thanks to Covenant funding, the plant upgrade is exceeding the anticipated 1000 tones extra per month. In May, 1400 tonnes or the equivalent of eight million stubbies, were diverted from landfill, a win for NSW, the environment and in reducing our reliance on virgin materials”.

Although we top the pops when recycling at home, we have some way to go recycling when ‘away’ from home, particularly in our shopping
centres. The ‘away from home’ sector has been a focus of the Covenant
since 2005. In an Australian first, the Covenant together with the Packaging
Stewardship Forum of the Australian Food and Grocery Council, Queensland EPA and the Victorian Government, developed new guidelines for establishing and maintaining effective recycling systems in shopping centres. The project researched all aspects of introducing recycling bins into shopping centres, such as to where to put the bins, bin types, issues to watch out for and how to work best with service providers and contract cleaners.

As a direct result of the project, Lend Lease Retail are now rolling out new bins in their nine shopping centres across Australia - plus other major players are hopping on board. To find out more please contact Jenny Pickles, General Manager, Packaging Stewardship Forum: jenny.pickles@afgc.org.au or (02) 6273-1466.

To further address the issue of away from home recycling, the Covenant teamed up with Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management to introduce public place recycling bins into major sporting stadia, tourism and entertainment venues, events and festivals.

One place they are also putting the bins, is the World Heritage Fraser Island.

Attracting up to 350,000 visitors every year, the beautiful island is protected from development but not from waste. Visitors produced last year, 3,400 tonnes of waste all of which was sent to landfill. Covenant CEO, Ed Cordner, said the new bins hope to capture this waste stream and are a win for the environment. “We hope Fraser Island visitors will do the right thing, stick it in the right bin and these new recycle bins divert a large amount of packaging waste from landfill,” Mr Cordner said.

According to Shire of Augusta-Margaret River waste officer, Barrie Naylor, Augusta faces an unusually high amount of packaging waste due to the local tourism and wine industries. “We concentrated on the packaging waste stream—of which 60% is glass,” Barrie said. Last year, the Shire sent 200 tonnes of glass to Adelaide for reprocessing but environment and transport costs were prohibitive, so they applied to the Covenant for funding to buy a glass crusher, to crush the glass locally and re-use as pipe embedment in road base. The crusher will soon be installed and Barrie said they already have 400 tonnes of glass stockpiled (see left).

“We cannot wait. We are going to smash our 870 tonne Covenant target,” Barrie said. “Our dream is to never send another wine bottle to South Australia again.” Go Margaret River!

Prior to their recent meeting in Perth, Covenant Council members made a special site visit to the Wangara Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) to look at the $3.6 million dollar plant upgrade—which has been supported by Covenant funding.

The establishment of the new MRF has enabled participating councils Wanneroo, Swan and Joondalup to move to commingled kerbside recycling bins. Fully operational since the Wangara MRF has doubled its sorting capacity from 16,000 tonnes per annum to 32,000 tonnes per annum, and increased the recovery of packaging materials and newsprint from 55% to 70.5%.