Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week our government's efforts to better recycle plastic have been on show. Hundreds of people attended the Plastics Summit yesterday, bringing together experts to discuss how to reduce and better recycle plastics. One of the attendees at the summit was a constituent of mine and a start-up company's inspiring founder Louise Hardman.

Louise is one of those brave people who paused her career as a zoologist to find a solution after a sea turtle in her care died because it had swallowed plastics. Since that day Louise has been working on a practical machine to reduce the amount of plastics entering the ocean. She has worked with engineers to build 'the Shruder' mark 2 prototype, and it has been tested in remote communities domestically and internationally. The machine turns waste plastics into recycled flakes which can be onsold for use in products like sunglasses or instantly remoulded into other usable products.

The Morrison-McCormack government have recognised the potential of this invention, and we are investing almost $2.5 million from the cooperative research centre projects into it. The Plastic Collective project is good for the environment, good for the Coffs economy, and it will help achieve one of the summit's aims—getting people to think about recovering resources, not just managing waste. (Time expired)