Recently I was invited by a non client to go and see first hand the positive impact Charopy is making. The invited came from a company doing the collection of container deposit scheme (CDS) material collected at various shopping centres run by different owners and centre managers. Whilst the collection company themselves were not yet a direct Charopy client, they definitely knew about our technology and wanted to show me the difference in the collection quality from a typical shopping centre using Charopy compared to a collection from a shopping centre still using traditional methods of source separation - mainly signage.
I got to see some high quality non contaminated bags of cans and bottles (no surprises they came from a food court with Charopy installed), but the photo above is a bag taken from a shopping centre not using Charopy. From what I was told it is not even worth sorting this and a bag like this one (and many more like it that I saw) will end up in landfill. Too bad for all the recyclable material inside - at a rough guess maybe 25% of it was CDS and thus should be recycled, but the contamination in that collection just makes sorting at this point unviable. A real pity, especially when people who do the right thing are obviously seeking a good recycling outcome by using a CDS bin in the shopping centre, not knowing there is very little chance of any of it actually being recycled.
Sham recycling bins are still way too prevalent in out-of-home location Australia. But with two new products being launched very soon by Charopy, we will continue to chip away at this problem.
