Around 126 tonnes of plastic waste stockpiled from NSW oyster farms

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Enough plastic to half-fill a football field has been collected from oyster farms along the New South Wales Coast and fed through a shredder to be recycled. A team from South Australia has developed a small mobile unit hoping it can help remove plastic from hard-to-reach estuaries.

Transcript

00:00Look beyond the beauty of these waters on the New South Wales mid-north coast and you'll

00:07find something less appealing, a pile up of plastic.

00:11I had quite a few large number of drums from damaged drafts from the cyclone, previous

00:20floods and stuff.

00:22It's a problem at oyster farms up and down the New South Wales coast.

00:26And transporting all this waste away for processing isn't easy.

00:30If we had put everything on this truck here and taped to the dump, we would have done

00:3330 dump loads.

00:34But what if the processing came to them?

00:37That's just what this team of recyclers have done, bringing a mobile shredding unit all

00:41the way from South Australia after noticing a similar problem around their home on the

00:45Eyre Peninsula.

00:47Funded by the New South Wales government, they've spent three weeks visiting the state's hard

00:51to reach oyster farms.

00:52Obviously, they don't really want them to go into landfill, so the best way we thought

00:57we could come up to get rid of it is to shred it and send it to be processed.

01:00With that making it bigger or smaller, a half a footy field at two metres high we would have

01:05moved.

01:06Well, it helps the farmer.

01:07You know, he doesn't have to take it to a large depot or, you know, transport it somewhere

01:12else to be processed.

01:13The project's end goal is a circular system where the recycled product goes back into the

01:18oyster industry.

01:19It would just be a matter of working with the oyster basket manufacturers, the growers,

01:24and making sure we can get a product good enough that can be reused into oyster baskets.

01:27For now, these plastic chips are being sent to Sydney, where they'll be recycled into

01:32insulation for communications cables.

01:35That's what it's all about, keeping the quality up, getting it to a processor, keeping the value

01:40up, and then that processor can sell it for a higher price.

01:42The people behind this project are eyeing opportunities interstate, but growers say long-term success

01:48will hinge on the venture becoming self-reliant.

01:51We've had other plastic recycling around in the area and simply because it's been government

01:58funded it hasn't turned into a viable project.

02:01And I'd like to see it continue, but trying to make it stand on its own feet, yeah, that's

02:07for somebody with a very smart business mind.

02:09In the short term, the team is ready to come back here next year and do it all again.

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