Park Lake State School recycles over 14,700 empty beauty products

Park Lake State School in the Gold Coast, Queensland, has won Australia’s first playground made from recycled beauty products in the national Garnier Recycled Playground Competition, in which schools around the country recycled over 145,000 empty beauty care products otherwise destined for landfill.

Technically, beauty product waste – such as empty shampoo bottles, used lipstick and body wash dispensers – is recyclable in Australia, however due to the high cost of recycling mixed-plastic items like these, most beauty product waste ends up in landfill. TerraCycle is an international recycling and upcycling company that takes hard-to-recycle packaging and turns it into affordable, innovative products.

From 9 October to 8 December 2017, Garnier and global recycling pioneers TerraCycle ran the Garnier Recycled Playground Competition to encourage preschools and primary schools nationwide to collect and recycle empty beauty products of all brands, and raise awareness about waste and recycling. Park Lake State School was the competition’s top collector for 2017. The school won a $45,000 recycled playground made from beauty product waste, which all schools collected during the competition period.

The empty beauty products collected by schools will be cleaned, shredded and melted down into hard plastic, which will be remoulded to make the playground. In its operations, TerraCycle’s goal is to create materials that can be used as a sustainable alternative to virgin materials and plastics, which require more crude oil in their production.

The Garnier Recycled Playground Competition was open to all pre- and primary schools and together, all participating schools collected an outstanding 145,000 units of empty beauty products. The competition runners-up up were Colyton Public School in Mt Druitt, NSW, and Main Arm Upper Primary School in Main Arm, NSW, who won $4,500 worth of prizes between them.

“We’ve been really inspired by Australian schools’ commitment to recycling in this program, and by their hard work in raising awareness about waste and sustainability,” said Jean Bailliard, General Manager of TerraCycle Australia & New Zealand. “The level of community support for local schools has been phenomenal.”

The 2017 Garnier & TerraCycle Recycled Playground Competition is part of the broader Beauty Products Recycling Program sponsored by the L’Oréal Australia Group, which includes brands such as Garnier, Maybelline, L’Oréal Paris and La Roche-Posay. The program allows all Australians to divert empty skin care, hair care and cosmetic products from landfill free-of-charge. Additionally, for each approved unit of beauty product waste received, collectors earn AU$0.02 per item for funding towards their school or nominated charity.

It’s free and easy to recycle beauty product waste with the Beauty Products Recycling Program – everyone can join and collect! The Beauty Products Recycling Program is ongoing, so schools and the community can continue to collect, recycle and raise funds in 2018. For more information about the Beauty Products Recycling Program, visit garnier.com.au/green.

TerraCycle program at Biome:

Biome Eco Stores currently offer a complimentary in store 'end of life' recycling program to all Biome customers. They accept all used product packaging and beauty and cleaning containers, which will then be responsibly recycled through the TerraCycle program.

Related: The environmental impact of plastic straws; The true environmental costs of disposable coffee cups; The environmental problem with palm oil

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Recycling plastic bags

Green newsflash!  You can stop throwing away flexible plastic bags like bread bags, grocery bags, frozen food, pasta and confectionery plastic packaging.  Recycling plastic bags is now possible in Australia.

We all know that hard plastic such as plastic bottles and containers can be recycled through kerbside recycling bins, but until now our household has been putting flexible plastics in the rubbish (meaning off to landfill).

We now gather all soft plastic in a separate bag and take them to our local Coles supermarket to the Redcycle bin located at the front of the store.  From there, the bags are used by Australian recycled plastic manufacturer Replas to make a range of products such as outdoor furniture, bollards and decking.

For those not able to visit Coles, we have asked Redcycle to let us know whether there are other options for non-metro residents to drop off bags.

The greenie ideal is for product manufacturers and distributors to take responsibility for their product throughout its entire lifecycle, including what happens to it at the end of its life.  Redcycle is a true product stewardship model where everyone involved in the life cycle of a product, including the consumer, has a role to play.

Soft plastic bags are a great scourge on our environment, ending up in our waterways and oceans. Alternatively, they are dumped in landfill or transported overseas to be dealt with there (that's another story!).  Recycling plastic bags not only helps reduce the pollution, but it also reduces the need to use precious resources to make virgin plastic.

What types of flexible plastic bags can be recycled?

• ✓ Bread bags
• ✓ Biscuit packets
• ✓ Frozen food bags
• ✓ Rice and pasta Bags
• ✓ Confectionery packets
• ✓ Cereal Box Liners
• ✓ Newspaper wrap
• ✓ Plastic shopping bags
• ✓ Old green bags

Find more info here about Redcycle, an initiative of  Melbourne based consulting and recycling organisation Red Group.

Greenie fact
According to Clean Up Australia, Australians are sending 429,000 soft plastic bags to landfill every hour.  That seems an incredible number!

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Take 3 initiative & single use plastics

Story by Biome's Online Manager:  Some of the Biome team recently attended a screening of the documentary BAG IT, which was promoted by Queensland Conservation and TAKE 3.

We learned how garbage and litter flows from our waterways out to sea and the harm it causes to water birds and sea life as well as our fragile ocean eco systems.

Turtles, who apparently eat everything, are attracted to floating plastic bags because they look like jelly fish.  While, all over the Pacific, albatross chicks are fed junk by their parents who mistake pieces of plastic for food and bring them back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year thousands of baby birds die from starvation, toxicity, and choking.  Carcases of these birds are found decaying with bits of plastic sitting in their stomach cavities still perfectly in tact.

 

TAKE 3 is “A Clean Beach Initiative” where you are encouraged to take at least 3 pieces of rubbish when you leave the beach, waterway or anywhere. You may not have put the rubbish there but you have the ability to take it away and make a difference. If we participate in this simple act and pass on this message we can help stop the damage our litter is causing to our fragile oceans and waterways.

There is no "away"

The documentary BAG IT is a light hearted look at the effect our addiction to single use packaging has in the world. We saw that although we think we are doing the “right thing” by recycling, most plastics are in fact not recyclable and get filtered into landfill.  Further, a huge amount of our “unwashed” plastics are being shipped to China and India to be processed in deplorable conditons.  Container ships are full when they come here carrying fast moving consumer goods, but they are empty on the return leg.  This makes it an inexpensive prospect to ship our garbage around the world to be processed by cheap labour, starting with sorting the heaps of stinking waste.  

The better solution is clearly to avoid plastics in the first place, or to re-use plastics many times before they are sent to "recycling".

Things you can do

• TAKE 3 - pick up other people's rubbish. We can greatly reduce the amount of marine debris in our oceans by preventing it from getting there in the first place.
• Reduce & re-use - use your reusable shopping bags and Onya Weigh grocery bags instead of plastic bags.
• Take your own container to the grocery store and shop from the Deli for meats and cheeses, or take them to the take-away from where you buy lunch and Friday night Thai. You can use stainless steel lunchboxes or glass containers that are BPA free.  
• Sign a petition to support the introduction of acontainer deposit system in Australia which will significantly increase the recycling rates of glass, plastic and aluminium drink containers. 
• Small plastic caps are not recyclable for many reasons, so although it's hard to believe, the responsible consumers are the ones who throw their plastic caps and lids into the rubbish instead of the recycling bin!  For this reason, try not to buy things with small plastic lids or get creative with them instead of throwing them away. 
• Watch the BAG IT documentary.  Find our where it is screening in Australia hosted by Tim Silverwood or visit the official BAG IT movie site.

 

You know how handmade soap gets all goopey on a soap dish? It’s because the soap sits in water and makes your lovely soap disappear faster. You can make this little soap dish with plastic lids that would usually be thrown away, to keep your soap dry by allowing excess water to drain away faster.

Here's another cool way to reuse your plastic drink bottles and lids. Vertical herb gardens are great for small spaces like balconies. 

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Put a cork in it

When 80% of the 20 billion bottles of wine produced in the world each year use natural corks, why do nearly all wine bottles in Australian bottle shops seem to have screw caps?

Is it a reflection of Australian culture?  After all, we drink a lot of beer with screw tops, perhaps we expect to be able to casually screw the top off a beverage.

Australia and New Zealand are among the leaders in this technological "development"--and it's uptake--along with other cork alternative, the Diam petrochemical plastic cork.  Commercial reasons must be driving the change because it's cheaper and reduces spoilage.  But, we seem to be accepting the move away from hundreds of years of tradition without much fuss.  Does some small percentage of wine oxidation really matter when we are once again replacing a truly sustainable solution with an non-renewable, petrochemical answer?

James Halliday posted his views of this debate and attracted some passionate replies! Apparently, the makers of screw caps contend that an aluminium cap generates less carbon in its manufacture and transport - compared with cork that has to travel all the way from Spain!

As someone comments on the Halliday post, "How can you suggest that screwcap production has minimal carbon footprint consequences? Have you considered the environmental impact associated with mining and smelting aluminium and the total amount of energy used in the process of manufacturing screwcaps? Transport is only one component when determining the environmental performance of a product over its life cycle."

And another reminds us that the bark of a cork tree regenerates and is harvested between 10 and 14 times during its 200 year life, in the process capturing 7 or 8 times more CO2 than had the cork bark never been harvested.

Australian environmental commentator Tanya Ha explains in her book Greeniology, the disappearance of cork is an environmental tragedy. "Cork is a wonderful, sustainable resource. The cork oak survives without chemicals, fertilisers or irrigation. Cork trees aren't cut down, only their outer bark is harvested every nine years....Over half the world's cork comes from cork-oak forests in Spain and Portugal. These forests are home to the endangered Bonelli's eagle and the Iberian lynx. As the world buys more wine with plastic stoppers or screw tops, these forests are losing their markets and the farmers are having to clear the land in favour of more profitable crops."

Cork is also biodegradable and readily recyclable so it does not need to end up in landfill. We have a well established recycling stream for cork in Australia.  According to the Planet Ark cork fact sheet: 

Girl Guides Australia has been a world pioneer in cork recycling, beginning its program in 1990. Since then, this program alone collected over 160 million corks. Currently, other community organisations including Motor Neuron Disease, Friends of the Zoos and Green Collect also collect
corks for recycling.

Both Biome eco friendly stores take pleasure in accepting your corks for recycling and handing them onto the Girl Guides.

Interestingly, Australia may lead the way with screw caps, but Planet Ark says, we also have the world’s largest wine cork recycling plant run by Logic Australia. The end result are new products like flooring, memo boards, placemats, coasters, floor tiles, gaskets, horse-float mats, boat decking and inners for hockey and cricket balls.

The story of cork is a common modern eco-dilemma, but we think that it is worth standing up for nature's solution.  It may seem like you're fighting against a tsunami of change, but every purchasing decision you make sends a message.

What Australian wine is bottled using a cork?

Searching online bottle shops, no one seemed to mention whether each wine has a cork or not.  The only winery that came up in searches was Harris Organic Wines, WA, who publish a statement about their commitment to cork.  Way to go!

We asked this question of our Facebook fans last year and they told us:
Brown brothers Riesling, Golden Grape Estate in the Hunter Valley,‎"Stones Gold" sparkling ginger wine, Brown Brothers Zibibbo Rosa, Bleasdale Vineyards eg. for "Frank Potts" Cabernet blend.

Perhaps you can add to our list by posting the names here or on our Facebook? 


Homewares made from cork

Cork wine bottle stopper

You can support cork through other products of course.  We have just introduced to Biome some cork homewares made in Spain from pruned branches and bark of oak trees grown on the Iberian Peninsula - a cork wine bottle stopper, cork trivet and cork soap dish.

Why not upcycle your corks into a real cork memo board?

Find inspiration on the behomemade.com blog. They made the gorgeous memo board pictured here from an old door frame and corks.

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Recycling, the art of re-invention

 

A gorgeous new product we have in store at Biome has inspired this post for Planet Ark's National Recycling Week being celebrated right now.

Made from reclaimed cotton shirts, this little recycle yourself doll on a key fob is accompanied by a booklet that tells its story from cotton on the bush transforming to a smart business shirt, then to a discarded shirt, before its re-invention into this quirky doll.  As the story concludes: 
And today, someone who reminds you that in your heart you have the strength to recycle yourself into whatever you want to be.

Isn't that so true about all recycling?  A material or an ingredient has a useful life in one form, but when that use comes to an end there are so many ways it can be re-invented, re-loved, re-used or upcycled. Upcycled being the term de rigueur that refers to the process of converting waste or useless products into new materials or products of better quality.

We don't recycle at Biome - well not much...

With all the deliveries of stock we receive in our stores, we gather a mountain of cardboard boxes and stuffing of various kinds from bubble wrap to polystyrene beads, shredded paper and compostable beads - but we take joy in not recycling.  Don't panic!  We re-use -- rather than recycle -- as much as we can.  Where ever we can re-box (as in re-use a box) or re-stuff (re-use stuffing materials) we will.  In fact, we even have our neighbours on the bandwagon.  The restaurant gives us their wine cartons, the laundromat gives us freebie magazines and the coffee shop gives us boxes.  They love it because their bins are less full and we love it because we don't have to buy boxes and stuff.  Some of our suppliers send re-boxes to us as well, then we use them again to send to you...so that is at least three useful lives before any more energy is used to recycle them!

Where can I recycle certain things?

Planet Ark's Recycling Near You program is gold. That is, Planet Ark deserves a gold medal for all their incredible work to promote education and uptake on recycling.  They have a telephone hotline, or, visit the website where you can type in your location and it delivers links on where you can recycle certain things.

The page for recycling in the Brisbane area has a wealth of leads.  For example, one link tells me what materials I can put in the household kerbside recycling bin in Brisbane
All these materials are collected:

• Glass Bottles and Jars (but not drinking glasses and plates)
• Aluminium Cans
• Aluminium Foil
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Office Paper
• Envelopes Without a Window
• Envelopes With a Window
• Phone Books
• Pizza Boxes (scrape the food out, some grease is ok)
• Egg Cartons (unless you know someone with chickens that can reuse them)
• Cardboard
• Steel Food Cans (does a magnet stick to it? it's steel if it does)
• Steel Paint Cans (empty)
• Steel Aerosol Cans (empty)
• Milk cartons
• Juice cartons
• Tin-plate or aluminium lids from steel food cans
• Plastics marked with
   

The last one is great news - they accept all plastics marked from 1 to 6, which is pretty much most firm plastics these days.  This was not always the case.
We aim to ensure that every plastic item stocked at Biome has a recycling symbol stamped on it - without that symbol there is no hope of it being recycled.

If you are into re-crafting, there are so many books and internet resources on how to make new things from old things.
Happy re-inventing!

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Recycling at holiday accommodation

This Easter, join our campaign to get your holiday accommodation to recycle!

Next time you stay at a caravan park, unit or hotel, can you find any mention in the room of separating your recycling?

On a driving holiday from Brisbane to Coffin Bay in South Australia, we've stayed at all manner of accommodation venues.   At nearly every place, there was nothing in the rooms or guest information about what to do with paper, bottles, cans and plastics.  There was generally just one all-in bin in the room.  At each place, we saved our paper and bottles and took them to the reception on checkout.  Most of the hosts were bemused, but happy to take them and promised to put them into the correct recycling.

What worried us, was that many guests would simply put all their rubbish into the one waste bin.  Imagine how much recycling is lost to landfill across all the holiday accommodation in Australia??  Perhaps the venues do separate the waste out the back somewhere - but I'm guessing that would be unlikely, plus it would be too late for paper that had since been mixed up with food scraps in the bin ...

We found only two places that did encourage the guests to separate bottles, and they were small operations in South Australia.  I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that South Australia has a bottle deposit refund scheme? If so, good on the venues for taking advantage of some additional income.  It is interesting how some financial reward is a great incentive -- one that is long overdue in the other States of Australia.

That said, at the "eco-certified" Wilpena Pound Resort in South Australia there was nothing in the rooms about what to do with paper, bottles and cans etc.  Again, just one bin in the room.

So this Easter, how about separating your recycling and taking it to reception on checkout?  And while you're there encourage them to put recycling bins in the rooms or information on where to put the recyclables.

The above picture shows the bottle recycling bins at Southern Blue Apartments, Port Lincoln.  There were bins under the sink in the room as well as outside in the car park.  And on arrival we were asked to recycle - awesome.

Don't forget to take your water bottle and KeepCup on holiday too, so you can reduce the amount of recycling and waste in any case!

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