By Siobhan Heanue
Posted Sun 20 Aug 2017 at 6:26am, updated Sun 20 Aug 2017 at 7:26am
Ashleigh Hansen and Ingrid Hatfield joined 100 other Canberrans at the Hume recycling plant open day.(ABC News: Siobhan Heanue)
Wine and beer bottles tossed away by Canberrans may soon end up helping to build the city’s roads and homes.
An $8 million upgrade of the recycling facility at Hume allows glass bottles to be imploded and turned into fine “glass sand”, which can be used in construction.
Recycling management company Re.Group, which runs the plant, said two construction companies have already agreed to trial glass sand generated in Canberra.
But Re.Group chairman Robert Hill warned that markets for recycled glass were not yet fully developed.
“It’s going to be hard work because you’ve got to convince prospective purchasers that the quality is there, that the product meets the purpose,” Mr Hill said.
The ABC’s Four Corners program recently exposed how recycling companies are stockpiling hundreds of thousands of tonnes of glass, or even sending it to landfill, because there is no viable market for the product.
But Mr Hill said some city councils were already using glass sand in road-building.
“It can be done … you have to invest in the equipment that turns the glass into sand and go to the trouble of developing the market,” he said.
Fine sand made from recycled glass could be used to build Canberra’s roads.(ABC News: Siobhan Heanue)
Intelligent cameras help turn trash into treasure
The re-vamped Canberra recycling plant also uses technology originally implemented to grade fruit to sort through different types of plastics.
Some plastic polymers are more valuable than others, so sorting them accurately allows the recycling company to seek a higher price.
The more the recycling company can charge for its products, the less it needs to charge the ACT for its recycling services.
The trommel machine sorts different types of plastics at the recycling plant.(ABC News: Siobhan Heanue)
Plastics get tossed through a giant sieve-like machine called a trommel, then spat onto a conveyer belt where every single item is rapidly photographed.
The photos are then cross-checked against a database of 80,000 images before a jet of air blasts each item into category where it belongs.
The new system also has a level of artificial intelligence, according to ACT City Services director-general Emmas Thomas.
“It will learn from what it’s separating each time and as it learns it will continue to improve the quality,” she said.
Growing piles of rubbish need somewhere to go
The recycling centre currently processes 250 tonnes of rubbish every day.(ABC News: Siobhan Heanue)
The new plant doubles the city’s capacity to process recyclable waste, to cope with a projected increase in the amount of rubbish generated by Canberra as the city grows.
At the moment, the facility gets 60 trucks through its gates and processes 250 tonnes of rubbish every day.
Half of that is paper and cardboard, which all gets sold to cardboard company Visy for re-use.
Recycling glass: The facts
About a third of the rubbish delivered each day is glass.
More than 100 Canberrans visited the facility for guided tours on Saturday, showing a keen interest in where their waste ends up.
“I care a lot about sustainability and wanted to learn about what happens to my recycling and how I can recycle better,” Canberran Ingrid Hatfield said before she took a guided tour of the waste plant.
“I want to see how it works, what goes in and what comes out.”
An ongoing challenge for the recycling plant is dealing with unusable waste – things like nappies and other rubbish still account for about 10 per cent of the rubbish put in recycling bins.
Posted 20 Aug 201720 Aug 2017, updated 20 Aug 2017
Link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-20/canberra-recycling-plant-upgrade-could-turn-bottles-into-roads/8823874
