‘Have a crack at it': Glass plant to recycle a billion bottles a year

Many people don't realise that they might have driven over the bottles they put in their recycling bins, some as often as twice a day.

How so? Their empties have been reused to help to make the roads we drive on.

Crushed glass sourced from kerbside recycling collections has been turned into sand to build Victorian roads, including the recent Tullamarine Freeway widening from Bulla Road to Power Street.

And two new plants will now divert the equivalent of 1 billion of glass bottles that cannot be recycled from landfill every year.

Read the story from The Age by Debbie Cuthbertson - “‘Have a crack at it': Glass plant to recycle a billion bottles a year.”

Coca-Cola launches ‘World Without Waste’ campaign

Coca-Cola Company has pledged to collect and recycle the equivalent of 100 percent of its packaging worldwide, and manufacture its bottles using at least 50 percent recycled plastic by 2030.

Waste pledge from Coca-Cola.

To achieve this ambitious goal, the beverage giant will need set up collect and recycling facilities in more than 200 countries where it sells its drinks range.

The company’s recycling strategy will also see investments in increasing customer engagement through educating them to recycle properly.

To this end, Coca-Cola will launch education plans at regional and local levels to inspire action.

Read the ClimateAction story - “Coca-Cola launches ‘World Without Waste’ campaign.“

We Should Never Have Called It Earth

Kate Marvel.

We should never have called it Earth. Three quarters of the planet’s surface is saltwater, and most of it does not lap at tranquil beaches for our amusement. The ocean is deep; things are lost at sea. Sometimes we throw them there: messages in bottles, the bodies of mutinous sailors, plastic bags of plastic debris. Our sewage.

Sometimes the things we lose slip unnoticed down the sides of passing ships. We expect never to see lost objects again, but every so often they are carried by shifting currents and swirling eddies to wash ashore on distant beaches. We are reminded that things, once submerged, have a habit of returning.

I am not afraid of the ocean, although I should be. On hot summer weekends I take my son to the beach. He toddles toward the water, laughs at the lazy waves splashing his fat baby legs. I follow behind, turn him back when the water reaches his naked belly. He is too young to know the sea gets deeper, that eventually it rises above your head and you must swim so as not to drown. I am prepared for nightmares as he grows and learns about the vastness of the ocean and the monsters real and imagined that swim there. He will soon know that evil things lurk in the deep.

Read the essay by Kate Marvel -  “We Should Never Have Called It Earth.”