Painting a brighter future with a circular approach
When businesses work together as part of a circular economy, great things can be achieved.
Instead of the traditional “take, make, dispose” model, a circular economy is a closed-loop system whereby materials are reused, repurposed, recycled and remanufactured.
A collaboration between Dandenong South business Dulux Powder Coatings and South Australian business Transmutation has shown how effective the circular economy model can be.
In 2022, Dulux Operations Manager (now Site Manager at Wyong in NSW) Graham Rowe was on holidays in Robe, South Australia, when someone in his camping group suggested he check out Transmutation.
Transmutation is an award-winning circular economy manufacturing and recycling business known for transforming hard-to-recycle industrial, agricultural and consumer plastic waste into building products and artisan homewares.
Over the years, they’ve collaborated with and supplied to big brands such as Country Road and John Holland, and Graham instantly thought Transmutation could help solve the riddle of what to do with Dulux’s powder coating waste.
“He basically sent me a challenge to say, ‘I’ve got powder coating waste at my factory in Dandenong South. Are you able to come up with some way to recycle it?’,” recalls Transmutation owner Brad Scott.
Through trial and error, Brad invented a way to recycle a combination of powder coating fines, agricultural waste and medical waste into PostPrime Plastic, a raw material that can be injection-moulded into any shape.
Dulux, Transmutation and plastics recycler Sustainable Plastic Solutions (SPS) partnered, and now Brad’s PostPrime Plastic is being used to make wheel stops and bar chairs, which are specialty spacers used in the underpinning of concrete construction.
Graham says sometimes it takes a community to solve a problem, but by working together towards the same goal, great things could be achieved.
“Reducing plastic is a really big challenge, and in this example, we were able to find a solution,” he says.
“It was a problem we’d tried many different ways to solve in the past.
“Dulux alone couldn’t have solved that problem – it was the collaboration.”
Current Dandenong South Dulux Operations Manager ANZ for Powders and Industrial Anna Mulligan says it’s a work in progress, and together with Transmutation, they were exploring other new products to manufacture.
“We’re excited about where it will go in the future,” she says.