Rubbish in, but look what comes out

Last updated 23:12 30/05/2008

STACY SQUIRES/The Press

LIKE MAGIC: Matthew Darby is turning plastic bags into shipping pallets, using a process he developed with a toasted-sandwich maker

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Today the kitchen, tomorrow the world for a Christchurch company that has found a way to dispose of the nearly one trillion plastic bags used worldwide each year.

In a "don't try this at home" story, Christchurch businessman Matthew Darby tried melting plastic shopping bags in the toasted-sandwich maker at home in 2003 after several nights experimenting with ways of getting rid of them.

Now Darby and business partners Hamish McCrostie and former All Black Byron Kelleher are fielding calls from companies in Europe, South Africa and the United States wanting to buy their Thermo-fusion machine, which turns the bags into plastic shipping pallets for industry.

Darby said New Zealand alone dumped about 12,000 tonnes of flimsy plastic shopping bags into the landfill each year.

"What we wanted to do is develop a technology for plastic that wasn't already being recycled," he said.

"I had a pile of plastic bags and I started playing around with melting them. I tried various kitchen appliances and then hit upon the toasted-sandwich maker because I could control the heat."

He then put the toastie machine in the freezer to cool the contents. "That's how we initially came up with the process."

Three years later, he and his business partners designed a prototype machine that now reprocesses half a tonne of plastic bags an hour at Range Industries' Bromley factory. The process has been patented.

Darby said five overseas companies were keen on buying Thermo-fusion machines, which cost more than $1 million.

There was also a huge market for plastic shipping pallets.

"It's wonderful because we've not done any promotional work or anything of that nature," he said. "People have found out about us. We won some packaging awards for the environment and got some responses out of that, and of course Byron Kelleher has been promoting us heavily in Europe.

"This is the third machine we've built. It's taken five years to get to this stage. The first machine was to solely reprocess plastic shopping bags, but as we got into it we found there was far greater need beyond that to deal with contaminated plastics and other grades that aren't recycled," he said. "We can take every piece of household plastic that is produced, silage wrap from farms, industrial waste as well. The great thing is it all goes in one end and we produce a pallet out of the (other) end."

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A desire to protect the environment was the catalyst for the breakthrough, Darby said. "While it was the environmental bent that got me on this tangent, I come from a commercial background, so anything I do has to be commercially viable."

Kelleher, now playing rugby for French club Toulouse, said the European market was more "tuned in to recycling" and saw sustainability as critical to the environmental debate.

June 5 is World Environment Day, sponsored by the UN and this year hosted by New Zealand. See Tuesday's Press for your Green Guide, printed on 100% recycled paper and featuring 100 ideas to save the world.

- © Fairfax NZ News