Info - Recycled Plastic Products & Bioplastics

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Most plastic products and packaging still end up in landfill once they have fulfilled their first use. This wastes the oil used to manufacture the items and pollutes the environment with long-lived waste. One alternative is to collect and sort waste plastic into identical polymer types, so that it can be recycled into useful new products such as outdoor furniture, wood building substitutes, new packaging and even pens and rulers. The recycled plastic pens in our range are made in the EU, Japan & China, while the recycled rulers are made in Australia.

Plastic Stats: About one and a half million tonnes of plastic is used in Australia each year (about 1 million tonnes is made locally, and 500,000 tonnes is in the form of imported products). About half of this ends up as waste. Householders throw away around 520,000 tonnes of waste plastic each year, much of which is short life packaging materials.

'BIOPLASTICS': Another approach to the long-lived nature of fossil-fuel based plastics and the problems they present in landfill is to include additives in their production which result in an accelerated biodegradable cycle in a common anaerobic landfill environment. In other words the additive helps break up the plastic in landfill to the point where it theoretically biodegrades to biogas and a biomass that adds nutrients to the soil. But we have concerns that while the plastic does break up into 'micro particles', these may end up as problematic micro plastics that are plaguing our oceans and landfill sites. Until the evidence is more clear, it's probably best to avoid these plastics in our view.