Bottle Cap Delivery a First for GBSAN

The Waste and Resource Recovery Team have made our first ever delivery of plastic bottle caps to Resitech in Brisbane. Resitech will melt the caps down to make slip sheets, root barrier guards and damp course, among other products. It has taken several months of collecting and many hours of volunteer sorting to amass thousands of bottle caps from the community. Thanks to Sancha, Lyn, Terry and Philippa for helping out.

Along the way we learned some valuable lessons to improve our collection method. We learned that not all caps have recycling code numbers which makes it very difficult for us to determine which type of plastic they are, and that some caps do have a number but it’s almost impossible to read unless we use a magnifying glass! Both of these problems are barriers to easy recycling, and it’s obvious that the packaging laws need to change to make it simpler for all communities to separate caps into their respective plastic types. Bottle caps are among the top ten plastic items listed as littering our beautiful beaches and waterways and usually they end up in landfill, so any action we can take to keep them out of the environment is worthwhile.

The Whistlestop Community Garden has 2 bins for clean and dry caps:

One bin is for milk caps and caps labelled as 4

Recycling symbol 4 LDPE

One bin is for soft drink, water bottle and tetrapak (long-life) caps labelled as 2

Recycling symbol 2 HDPE

Remember that if you can’t read the symbol then neither can we, so if in doubt leave it out.

Lyn Rowley and Catherine Arden have volunteered to take over the bottle cap recycling and the Terracycle recycling at the Whistlestop Community Gardens. There will be more about this handover next month. Terracycle bins are currently in place to accept hair care product containers, clean cling wrap and zip lock bags and coffee pods.