Soft Plastics
Close the Loop accept soft plastics direct from councils as well as industry partners and retail store drop-off programs.
Close the Loop facility in Melbourne recycles soft plastics, along with cosmetics and print consumables such as printer cartridges and toner bottles. The Australian-designed, Australian-made recycling technology used to recycle soft plastics and creates TonerPlas® and rFlex®.
TonerPlas® is an engineered polymer compound used for improving asphalt (namely for road applications).
rFlex® is an innovative recycled plastic material that can be used to make rigid plastic products, including tertiary packaging such as pallets, crates, trolleys, and baskets.
In 2024 11,526lt of soft plastics were collect and recycled here at Marong Neighbourhood House.
E -Waste
Our E-Waste station is located under the side verandah and is accessible 24 hours.
We accept small to medium sized items powered by mains electricity or battery.
You can also drop off batteries, printer cartridges and mobile phones to this station.
In 2024 465kg E-waste and 75kg Batteries were collected and recycled here at Marong Neighbourhood House.
Mobile Muster
MobileMuster is the mobile telecommunications industry’s product stewardship program, and it is managed by the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA) on behalf of its members. It is a voluntary, not-for-profit scheme that is funded by all the major handset manufacturers and network carriers to provide a free mobile phone recycling program in Australia.
MobileMuster’s recycling partner is a global leader in e-waste recycling and its process can recover more than 95% of the materials in a mobile phone. They can even recycle your plastic cases and accessories, and the paper and cardboard from your mobile phone packaging.
Materials that are extracted from your mobile phone include glass from the screen, aluminum from the phone casing, valuable metals such as gold, silver, palladium, platinum, and copper from the circuit board, as well as metals such as steel and a mixed metal compound of graphene, nickel, cobalt, and lithium from the lithium batteries.
In 2024 six (6) Mobile phones were recycled here at Marong Neighbourhood House.
Blister Packs
Our Medication Blister Pack recycling has grown over the last year from 1kg per month to 8kg per month. Yes, that is a lot of blister packs that have not gone into landfill achieving sustainable outcomes that align with circular economy principles of our region.
We now send our blister packs to Pharmacycle for processing.
Collected blister packs are transported to Melbourne then onto their processing facility located in Sydney.
The empty blister packs are then put through a series of mechanical recycling processes to separate the aluminium foil/seal from the plastic blister. The steps include shredding, grinding, air-density separation, and finally electrostatic separation.
Once separated the aluminium and plastic material is kept in bulk bags until enough material is ready to be sent to end-users.
Regrettably there is a cost involve with the processing and fright for this recycling. We are very fortunate to have received sponsorship, for six months, from Eaglehawk UFS for the cost to us for this blister pack recycling.
For 2024 we recycled 58 kg of Medication Blister Packs.