Revolve Your World and The Norfolk Wave dream

We thought it might be a good time to recap who we are, what the Norfolk Wave is all about, and how we’re working towards achieving this dream.

Huus aklan? Revolve Your World is a social business committed to providing waste recycling solutions customised to suit small communities. Conversations between Norfolk and RYW began in 2021 when Norfolk Island Regional Council was looking for an alternative to export and landfill of waste in Australia, which was becoming expensive and unsustainable. . It was also around the time that NIRC took steps to prevent impacts to the marine park and stop the disposal of solid waste at Headstone. After many months of conversation, ideas, tendering, planning, and community meetings, we opened the doors to The Norfolk Wave Recycling Centre on the 1st of August, 2023! The weeks following our opening were baptism by fire! It’s the first system of its kind, operating with new staff in a new environment and amongst a new community. But we’ve come so far in such a short time!

TNW is based on a circular economy model, where waste (materials) come in, are repurposed/recycled into products that go back into the community to support food security and sustainable development.

The system’s success relies on resource recovery and control (and a supportive community and A-team of course!). At RYW, we don’t view waste as waste. Instead, we see it through the lens of an opportunist, where everything is a resource and has endless uses and potential. The more we can recover, the more we can repurpose and recycle. The control aspect comes in where quality is concerned. At The Norfolk Wave, we are repurposing Norfolk’s household and commercial ‘waste’ into usable products for the community. To produce high-quality products or outputs, we need high-quality inputs. Inputs can be anything from plastic or glass to cardboard, metals, food waste, etc. We can repurpose each of these resources into their own respective products. We use the word ‘contamination’ to refer to anything that might affect the purity of our input materials and, ultimately, the quality of our output products.

To allow us the utmost control over the quality of these input materials, we do the majority of sorting and, if necessary, cleaning ourselves at TNW. It’s helpful if the community comes to TNW regularly with smaller loads, rather than once a month with a whole truck. We ask that yorlyi in the community sort into the following five material streams.

Food/organics- food, organics, teabags, eggshells, compostable packaging, paper towels, serviettes etc.

Glass- glass bottles, vases, jars, ceramics

Hazardous- vapes, e-waste, chemicals, batteries, aerosols, herbicides, etc.

Recyclapod- CLEAN materials that do not classify into the above streams. Aluminium cans, steel tins, plastic bottles, chip packets, plastic wrappers and packaging, cardboard, paper, clothing, etc.

Sanitary- UNCLEAN items. Bandaids, tissues, unwashed meat bags, hygiene products, dog poo, coffee pods, floor sweepings, etc.

‘Contamination’ refers to a range of things, and sometimes it may confuse exactly what contamination is, so what does contamination look like in each material stream?

In Food/organics, it looks like: plastic bags, glad wrap, coffee pods, and anything that won’t compost.

In Glass, it looks like: lids, metal,

leftover food, and unrinsed jars (wine bottle cuffs are ok).

In Recyclapod, it looks like: glass, teabags, food waste (chicken bones, eggshells, leftovers in containers, coffee grounds, tea leaves, spilled milk from cartons, etc.), unrinsed packaging like roast chicken bags and frozen berry bags, tissues, pads, tampons, nappies, cotton buds, paper towel etc.

In Sanitary: sanitary doesn’t have ‘contamination’ as such, but often, items in sanitary could be rinsed clean and re-classified as Recyclapod.

Contamination in the above forms is the most important thing that we as a community must work to reduce. When items come into TNW contaminated, it takes time, water, and resources to decontaminate them before we can recycle them. If things are too heavily contaminated, it results in export to landfill at a very high cost to the community.

With an initial aim of diverting 90% of Norfolk’s household and commercial waste from landfill, we were more than pleased when we crunched the numbers and found that during our first two months of operation, we were already managing 72% diversion. With continued education and awareness, this number can only go up!

Our products are well into production and distribution. We’re processing about 400kg of glass each week into glass sand. This is then screened into four different grades or ‘decks’ and is available to the community for various uses, from driveway filler and aggregate to sandblasting and leveling trenches. The possibilities are endless! Our concrete aggregate, using polymers from recycled plastic (types 1-7), carbon from cardboard waste, and hydrated lime, is also in production! Our first concrete block was poured two weeks ago and is undergoing testing for strength and durability to find the perfect aggregate ratio. Additionally, available through the NIRC is high-quality compost from food, green, and paper waste. We’re proud to be helping out this process by providing food/organics with much reduced plastic contamination due to our handling procedure.

For anyone that might be reading about Revolve Your World, The Norfolk Wave, or our journey for the first time, you can learn a whole lot more by following us on Facebook and Instagram at The Norfolk Wave, by visiting our website www.thenorfolkwave.com, reading our weekly articles in the Norfolk Islander, or catching us at 8 am each Tuesday fortnight on Radio Norfolk.

Thaenks f aklan yorlyi

Lil, Mandi, Nat, and the Revolve Your World team