Of the 7.8 billion tonns of plastic produced between 1950 to 2015 , just 9% has been recycled, although some has been incinerated, the majority is still out there in landfill, contributing to global warming or in the environment destroying natural habitat. 

We are crowdfunding to establish our social and environmental enterprise, which aims to counter the production of disposable plastic by raising awareness through workshops and documentary as well as responsably recycling plastic waste into bespoke products.

Mid last year we started a social enterprise because we were appalled and concerned about two things: the amount of plastic waste inundating the local environment and the world; and the increasingly hostile discrimination against refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. 

To cut a long story short, we saw a need for more businesses to offer meaningful employment to refugees and asylum seekers and basically give them the opportunity to function and be accepted as normal human beings in Australian society. So the logical progression for us was to start an environmentally sustainable business with the ultimate goal of employing asylum seekers and marginalised community members, too easy, mate.  

In February '18, (just before the China National Sword policy came into effect, may we add) we began thinking about ways to confront environmental plastic pollution. During our initial stages of research we discovered the open-source designs of dutch designer Dave Hakkens, through his project Precious Plastic.  Immediately we knew that we needed those machines and our minds frolicked, abundant with ideas of what we could make with our recycling machines. 

Through a series of fortunate events we met some inspiring people who have started a plastic recycling studio with these very same (with some minor alterations) machines, the Proto Hub. We want to support their endeavours as we have very similar visions and together we can make bigger changes! We will support them with two years of membership in their Proto Hub studio working alongside them. There, the 'rubbish' we have, and continue to collect from the environment and from local businesses (rubbish too small to go through the mainstream recycling systems, and/or the 'unrecyclable') will be transformed into bespoke coffee tables, stools, planter pots, and more. 

Using our established knowledge, and pooling the knowledge and know-how of our connections in the plastic waste field we will create an educational workshop kit for communities. This will involve making things from found waste and conducting interviews with a diverse array of people so that we can keep a record and create a resource for communities made by communities, utilising community waste. We hope that this will generate awareness and behaviour change around the problem of plastic waste, and that local businesses will be encouraged to jump on board and change their habits as well, pushing larger businesses to follow suit.  We want to extend this work with film to make more broader documentaries around the problem of plastic waste to demonstrate how it affects everyone. 

We want to do all of this as sustainably as we can, saving water, and energy, and using second hand materials and equipment as much as possible.

In this way we can tackle the problem of plastic waste – a problem that is not only killing our wildlife and polluting our environment, but that is adding to the concerning levels of CO2 and Methane warming our World – from every angle! 

Please help Colourful Collective to start up our start-up!