In just over two years, their small Hamilton-based business, Sustainable Plastic Solutions, has reclaimed 3,000 tonnes of plastic and has created a world-leading closed-loop circular economy for grain tarpaulins.
They’ve just received a federal grant for matched funding of $9 million that will expand their operations to 16,000 tonne capacity per year and should enable them to tackle the so-far-unsolvable problem of recycling silage wrap.
But in the beginning, it was all financed by local farmers.
In the short term we need more like this. In the long term we simply need to stop producing and using plastics on this scale. Recycling is good but by the time plastic gets to this stage in its ‘life-cycle’ much of the environmental damage has already been done through production, manufacturing and transport.