A fantastic move to plastic

SINCE launching last year, GroundUp has been collecting cafe coffee waste and food scraps and taking it to growers for composting with the aim of keeping the refuse out of landfill.

But founder and director Eliza Whitburn-Weber isn’t stopping there.

Now she’s making the move to recycling soft plastics and engaging not just her hospitality clients, but the retail and manufacturing industries as well.

“This opens up opportunities for us to partner with so many more businesses and organisations, because soft plastics are everywhere. So many people have soft plastics as a part of their business,” she said.

“Revolution Print, for example, have been mindful of their soft plastics and we’ve already collected multiple times from them. We’re also partnering with florists to collect green waste, so we can take the soft plastics from their flowers at the same time.

“Soft plastics are often an unwanted but necessary thing in business, but at least if we can collect them and divert them from landfill, we know they’re going to be recycled.”

All of the soft plastics GroundUp collects, from plastic bags, food wrappers, and clingwrap to clothing packaging and pallet wrap go to one of Victoria’s leading soft plastics manufacturers, APR Plastics.

Here, the materials will be melted back into an oil, and turned into food-grade quality plastic.

“This technology is not limited in what can be put through it, so any places that have coloured soft plastics, food wrappers, and so on, we can take those and make sure they’re ending up in the right place,” Ms Whitburn-Weber said.

“The basic rule of thumb is, if you can scrunch it up, it’s a soft plastic.”

GroundUp will be available to collect the plastics as often as businesses need.

Within their first six months of operation alone the company diverted 23,000 kilograms of coffee grounds and kitchen scraps from landfill.