Trash to treasures
Recycled products are all around us – you just need to know where to look.
Here at SV, our eyes are wide open to the endless possibilities of recycled materials. We see the beauty in waste and invest in the research, development and innovation needed to bring new, exciting recycled products to market.
From breakfast to bath time, we’re highlighting a few of the beautiful recycled items that might already be hiding in your home.
Child’s play
The next time you head to the beach, you might end up packing recycled milk bottles along with your towel and sunscreen.
Supported by a $30,455 grant from Sustainability Victoria, Happy Planet Toys is creating a unique pelican-inspired bucket and spade set made from 100% recycled HDPE from plastic milk bottles.
All Happy Planet Toys products are also recyclable, meaning once your family is finished with them, they can return them to the recycling bin where they came from.
The good egg
Premier’s Sustainability Awards finalist Precious Plastic Melbourne is at the forefront of a grassroots micro-recycling movement in Australia.
From their closed-loop plastic recycling facility in Nunawading, the innovative, family-owned enterprise is designing and producing small-scale recycling equipment to manufacture functional products and create a valuable resource from what was once considered waste.
Their range of bespoke products including these sweet and stylish egg cups are handcrafted by their team in Melbourne and created from 100% locally sourced, reclaimed plastic bottle tops.
Superfood spirulina
What if your breakfast smoothie could benefit your health and the environment at the same time?
Waste Mining is exploring new technology to transform our food scraps into nutrients that could be used to grow the popular superfood spirulina, supported by funding from Sustainability Victoria’s $1.6 million Recycling Victoria Research and Development Fund – Organics.
The Colac company is using anaerobic digestion and aquaculture technologies to treat separated food waste. The resulting by-product will be used as nutrients for growing spirulina for human consumption and duckweed for animal consumption.
Greening your garden
A $5 million grant from Sustainability Victoria has enabled Garden City Plastics to increase the use of recycled plastic in their production of plant pots.
The upgrade and expansion of their Dandenong manufacturing facility includes installing new equipment that will ensure they can continue to produce plant pots made from recycled plastic that are also 100% recyclable.
Garden City Plastics also runs a recycling program so growers can return their pots to 30 locations Australia-wide so they can be given another life.
Winter warmers
Victorian winters can be rough. It might be time to invest in a snuggly blanket that will warm your heart as much as your bed.
Seljak’s award-winning product is made from factory floor offcuts, deadstock yarn and post-consumer textile waste like woolly jumpers past their best.
Sustainability Victoria was delighted to collaborate with Seljak as a panellist at the Designing the Circular Economy Symposium during Melbourne Design Week hosted by our Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre (CEBIC).
The average Victorian creates 28 kg of textile waste each year, but only 7% of textile waste is recycled.
Solving our problem with textile waste is not just about recycling. CEBIC also works to accelerate circular economy approaches to textile production that design out waste and pollution from the get-go, minimising the environmental impact of the $8.2 billion textiles industry in Victoria.
