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Source: ONE News -
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If you knew there was an environmentally friendly, innovative and commercially viable way to make use of your dirty plastics would you support it?
And what if this new technology also created jobs?
Well, a Waiheke Island local, John Stansfield, has developed just that. His only problem? Getting enough rubbish to make it work.
Luscious lettuce is literally growing out of litter.
"What we've developed is a process that turns rubbish into gold," says Stansfield.
The box the greenery is growing in used to be household recycling, most of which would have ended up in landfills.
"Juice cartons, dirty coffee cups, old plastic margarine cans. Through the machine, then it comes out as lovely nice dry pellets which we can then add fibre to which produces this wonderful product which we can make our fibre reinforced plastic board from," says Stansfield.
Plastic fibre products are not new in themselves but they are typically made with high grade plastics. With some help, John Stansfield has created a process that uses dirty plastics.
"That means you can put in things like tantalised timber, which is really dangerous, the dirty old coffee cup, alongside your used toothpaste tube and a polystyrene meat tray."
Out of this he reckons you can make virtually anything.
"I'm a vinter. I could see myself having posts in my vineyard made out of this."
Basically, recyclables get ground up and then put through an agromulator which stretches the plastic around the fibre.
"We've gone through all of our trial phases. We're now ready to scale up," he says.
Stansfield claims the process could make use of not just Waiheke's rubbish, but half of Auckland's too. So what's stopping him?
"We need to know that we've got a secure long-term supply of rubbish so that we can invest in the plant," he says.
That's rubbish contracts he's talking about, pre-investment.
"For a community this size it'll be a couple of hundred thousand dollars but we could be spending that across the country and creating a lot of very sustainable long term jobs."
If Stansfield gets his way, we'll all be able to see tangible benefits from our recycling efforts.
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