By David Singh, Managing Director, Re.Group
Victoria celebrated the one-year anniversary of its Container Deposit Scheme (CDS) in November, and the state marked an impressive milestone: one billion containers returned in just 12 months. Re.Group is thrilled to have contributed to this outcome, with five of our Return-It depots ranking in the top 10 metro refund points. This achievement underscores the positive impact our network is having in Victoria and across Australia.
Re.Group has grown over the past decade. This organisational growth is not just of the bricks and mortar kind, but also industry knowledge and experience through the carefully selected acquisition of employees who are our greatest assets, and through formation of true partnerships with our clients and other stakeholders.
We have demonstrated time and again the great outcomes we can deliver by working collaboratively together with local governments, community groups, and our industry partners; we always strive to work well with others and remain focused on the ‘big picture’.
We set out with a vision to deepen our impact on recycling and drive our mission for a wasteless society, with our values at the heart of all that we do. Today, our MRF and CDS networks reach millions of Australians across NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, WA, the ACT, and New Zealand, although this growth has not come without its challenges. If you’re reading this magazine, you’d know that waste management and resource recovery is a tough gig for a multitude of reasons – batteries, need we say more? But it is these very challenges that drive our commitment to developing high-quality facilities and solutions.
This is why we are incredibly proud of the many new, award-winning facilities that we have built in the last decade, including our Adelaide SMRF and more recently, the Sunshine Coast MRF. You may have read about these facilities in the media – we’re not shy of our accomplishments, and nor should anyone in the sector be. What we do is hard, and meaningful; when we do it well, we make a difference for the communities we serve, and we should celebrate those outcomes proudly when we can.
Read more: Re.Group acquires Polytrade
New and shiny kit is often exciting to rave about, but one of the things that perhaps we do not do as well is talk about our deep commitment to – and the accompanying grunt work in – bringing our older facilities acquired in 2022 into the Re.Group fold, or the Re.Group way. Back in 2022, against the backdrop of infrastructure gaps in NSW and Victoria, the urgent need for increased local processing due to the export bans, and our vision to improve resource recovery outcomes through our tried and tested management principles and plant design, we acquired Polytrade which had a number of MRFs across these states. Since then, we have made, and continue to make, significant investments in these MRFs to not just provide much needed capacity, but to also support better outcomes in resource recovery of both commingled recycling and CDS.
We pointed to Victoria’s impressive CDS record early in the piece, and the success our Return-It team has had in the world’s newest container refund scheme. A pillar of support for the scheme has been our Hallam Container and Plastics Sorting Facility, and this is a prime example of our ongoing investment. In 2023, Re.Group embarked on a journey to transform the Hallam recycling facility into a dual-purpose operation that could optically sort both containers from our CDS collections (except glass – but more on that to come) and mixed plastics received from our network
of MRFs.
Over the course of eight months (and millions of dollars later), our talented RDT engineering team had equipped the facility with a host of advanced equipment, from new trommels, magnets, windsifters and eddy currents, to high-tech optical sorters that sort plastics into six separate polymers, including clear PET, coloured PET, natural HDPE, and Polypropylene. The outcomes for mixed plastic sent to this facility are the same as we achieve in those shiny new sites. While there’s different pathways for getting there, we ensure the same great outcomes for the materials that the community trust us to process.
In Sydney, our Enfield Glass Beneficiation Plant (GBP) has added another layer of capability to our network (on top of our existing GBP in Dandenong Victoria – where that CDS glass goes). Commissioned in August 2022, the new GBP is designed with the latest glass processing technology to handle and colour-sort glass into cullet for bottle-to-bottle recycling. It is state-of-the-art, with specialised equipment installed to colour sort glass into 8-50mm and 3-8mm glass fractions. It is built with an advanced glass cleaning system featuring different types of vibrating screen systems, magnets, and eddy currents, as well as x-ray sorting and 16 optical machines that sort glass into amber, flint, and green cullet.
With a built capacity of 100,000t/a, there is an exciting opportunity to grow glass processing in Sydney, so watch this space.
These are but two of our acquired assets that we have made myriad improvements to. Investment continues in these MRFs and we have a pipeline of upgrades slated for our other facilities, including our Dandenong MRF and GBP, and Chinderah MRF, alongside other exciting new projects that we’ll soon unveil.
We’re not content with mediocre. What we aspire to achieve is a network of Re.Group facilities – old, new and everything in between – that consistently meet the highest standards that we set for ourselves. At the end of the day, we may not be able to fully control the materials we receive (though we will continue to educate and advocate), but we can certainly continue on a path of improvement to provide certainty to our customers and the community that partnering with Re.Group means choosing a future-focused, resilient approach to recycling. Our mission is to make sure every material we handle has the best chance at a second, third, or even continuous life, contributing to a truly circular economy for Australia.