Hundreds of plastic bottle lids were sorted at the Mount Gambier Library on World Environment Day.
The lids will be used for Project Recology at Tenison Woods College, where machines are used to shred and melt plastics down to be transformed into new products.
Items range from jewellery and keychains to practical products including cup holders, chopping boards, Lazy Susans, and coasters.
People donate number two and number four plastic lids in bins located in the Mount Gambier Civic Centre, Coles, and Woolworths supermarkets, which are collected by the Rotary Club of Mount Gambier Lakes and taken to Tenison Woods College.
Plastic bread tags can also be donated, which are sent to Transmutation at Robe, and oral care products such as toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes, which are sent to Melbourne for recycling.
Mount Gambier City Council environmental sustainability officer Aaron Izzard said the sorting session was held at the Mount Gambier Library due to an enormous amount of donations.
“The program has been very successful, so we are getting more lids than we can deal with at the moment, so the idea for World Environment Day was to get people in to help sort them out into the different types and different colours to make them easier to recycle,” Mr Izzard said.
“Plastic lids, because they are so small, they would not ordinarily get recycled, so at the recycling centre anything that is smaller than, say, 50mm wide, falls through the gaps and it ends up in the landfill, so all these lids would have ended up at the landfill where they just get buried and wasted.
“But you can turn them into new things, give them a new life, recycle them.
“It reduces waste to landfill; it is also very expensive to build landfills and to operate and maintain the landfill, so it is putting them back into circulation and turning them into useful products.”
Mr Izzard said the machines at Tenison Woods College could make very thick panels, up to 2cm thick.
“The school is actually replacing their timber park benches which are breaking down and rotting with this plastic, which should last for years and years,” he said.
“You can imagine how many lids would go into a plastic seat top, you are recycling lots and lots of lids in just that one item.”
Mr Izzard said Project Recology was a great opportunity for the community to play a part in helping the environment.
“It is just a simple thing that people can do just to keep that awareness and do their bit,” he said.
“With waste basically everything adds up, it seems like it is just a lid that would not really matter, but when you add it up and see all the thousands of lids here … along with every other waste item it does build up into a mountain of rubbish out of the landfill.
“Anything that people can do helps to reduce that and also ends up saving the community money, too.”
