Life on the West Island - Lids4Kids

For several years, Life on the West Island has been assisting an innovative West Island charity called Lids4Kids, initially collecting plastic milk bottle tops from friends, neighbours and members of groups with which we are associated. This has now grown into a much bigger project, as we will explain. But let’s start from the beginning. This is how the Lids4Kids website describes its origins and growth:

Lids4Kids Australia was founded as a grass-roots 100% volunteer project in May 2019 by Tim Miller, a Canberra-based full-time house dad with three boys under ten. When Tim enquired about where to drop off his thousands of plastic bottle lids, the ACT Government advised him that any piece of plastic smaller than a credit card can’t be recycled and had to go to landfill. Whilst Tim is a revhead owning 1950s Holdens his whole life, he’s also passionate about the environment, so he wanted to find an alternative.​

A quick search led to Envision, a Victorian based not-for-profit which has many community projects supporting disadvantaged people and those with a disability. After discovering that Envision were turning plastic bottle lids into mobility aids for children, Tim decided to create Lids4Kids to help collect more lids. When ABC News posted a story about the plastic lid collection, it went viral on social media with over 800,000 views. The regional Lids4Kids Facebook groups receive hundreds more members each week, bringing together stakeholders to find new and innovative ways to help kids with lids! ​

Due to the overwhelming success of Lids4Kids, the 250,000 lid collection target was achieved within weeks and after several months over five million lids had been donated to Envision who quickly adapted and started producing many other recycled plastic products such as park benches, kitchen splashbacks and cubby house roof tiles. Rather than ending the collection, Tim and his volunteers agreed to keep going and register Lids4Kids Australia as its own environmental charity committed to rescuing every plastic bottle lid from going into landfill to protect our environment and benefit kids.

Initially, the project to create mobility aids for disabled children achieved some success, but after two years of product development and quality assurance activities, Envision announced that …for the past several months, much effort has gone in to reformatting the design, production and reconfiguration of HDPE and LDPE plastic. Despite our best efforts, the children’s mobility aids that we have produced from recycled bottle caps have not met our internal quality standards. Regrettably, this phase of the project will cease.

Not to be deterred, Lids4Kids decided to branch out on its own by moving into a much broader field of recycling to raise funds for children’s activities and education. Working with commercial and charity partners, it developed a highly successful not-for-profit programme which remains centred in Canberra, but now has groups around the nation collecting and recycling a wide range of items, including:

• Plastic lids: milk/UHT; water and soft drink bottle lids
• Plastic bread tags
• Wine bottle corks
• Wine bottle aluminium lids
• Aluminium ring pulls from cans
• Empty foil or foil/plastic tablet blister packs.

If you were able to watch the first programme in the second series of War on Waste on ABC TV this week, you would have seen how large volumes of tablet blister packs are being shredded and processed, especially to recover the valuable aluminium foil which can be recycled at a fraction of the cost (and energy usage) of manufacturing new aluminium. The same applies to aluminium wine bottle caps.

Meanwhile, Lids4Kids has partnered with industrial resource recovery firms to recycle the various types of plastic in the large volumes it collects, especially from plastic milk bottle and soft drink lids. These are sorted into colour groups, shredded, melted and reformed into valuable products. To help fund its storage and operational costs, Lids4Kids now sells attractive benches, tables and garden furniture in rainbow colours manufactured from tens of thousands of these reformulated plastic lids.

While the Lids4Kids motto remains Rescuing plastic for the planet, it has actively moved into being a more ambitious not-for-profit recycling and recovery operation for many other materials. This enables it to generate funds for community children’s organisations and to employ a part-time coordinator. All other staff are volunteers, ranging from schoolchildren to members of Probus and Senior Citizens’ clubs. A visit to the main Canberra Lids4Kids depot will find groups of cheerful volunteers sorting contributions into large bins, separating lids into colour groups or feeding plastics into a grinding machine for further reprocessing. Similar activities now occur in almost all states, and Lids4Kids groups are also springing up in many regional areas.

Life on the West Island is pleased to be associated with the Lids4Kids project. We are looking forward to the next batches of lids, tags, corks and blister packs in our collection boxes located around our region, ready to be cleaned, sorted and delivered to the organisation as it goes from strength to strength.