Plastic processor closes

•  Silage wrap will now be sent to landfill. Photo supplied.

By Daisy Baker,
May 18, 2022

The closure of the state’s only soft plastic processor, Envorinex, will have ongoing impacts on the local agriculture and fish farming industries. 

The company which had plants in Bell Bay and George Town went into voluntary liquidation on April 22.

Since 2009 Envorinex had been recycling soft and rigid plastics and reprocessing them into resin pellets for a range of items including guideposts, non-slip matting and vineyard netting clips.

Envorinex offered a free collection service to farmers wanting to recycle their silage wrap and black poly irrigation piping.

Managing director Jenny Brown said the service had a huge uptake, particularly from farmers in the North-East and Wynyard.

Envorinex was processing around 600 tonnes of silage wrap a year.

“Silage wrap is a very difficult plastic to work with. It is very dirty,” she said.

“We were having major issues with it. It was breaking our line because it was so strong. That wasn’t helping our case at all.

“We would have spent half a million on the silage line, trying to get it to work. That was out of our cash.”

Herrick farmer Andrew Lester had been using the service for the past two to three years.

Mr Lester said he uses around a tonne or a tonne and a half of plastic silage wrap each year.

He said Envorinex hadn’t collected any plastic for the last eight or so months, as they stopped when they were at capacity, but their closure will leave a void.

“It’s not just my farm that’s affected, it’s the whole farming community,”
he said.

“It’s disappointing to see. There is no other place for it but to put it in landfill.

“There should be something from the government to step in and make the business a viable opportunity for environmental and economic reasons. It does provide a lot of benefits to the community not only environmental.”

Ms Brown said Dairy Australia is currently working on a trial program in Victoria for silage wrap processing, which if successful will be replicated in Tasmania in the coming years.

In the interim, however, farmers are left with no option but to send their waste to landfill.

Ms Brown said the salmon industry was one of the biggest contributors to their waste streams with materials from fish pens.

A spokesperson from Huon Aquaculture, who has farms in Bridport and Springfield, said they ceased sending rope and pipe to Envorinex in 2020 and have since been working to reuse pen components across their farming operations.

Envorinex had five contracts in Tasmania, several on the mainland and three export contracts.

“It was the exports that brought us undone as Tasmania does not have available export containers and bringing empties across from Melbourne was not viable,”
she said.

“We had orders for 198 tonnes of pellets to export. In the first week of April, we tried to book six containers but could only get two and they were sailing out of state on June 26 so we couldn’t even receive those containers until mid-June.

They brought three empty containers over from Melbourne in March to try to keep up with the demand but this was ultimately a loss for the company.

Ms Brown said they were in the process of an expansion and were establishing another plant in Queensland, both of which have now gone by the wayside.

“This decision was not made easily by my business colleague, Mike Turner and myself, we are devastated that our endless hours of research in creating circular economy programs has now gone and the effects this has had on our employees, customers, suppliers and Australia,” she said.

“Hopefully someone else may pick up the machinery and continue the hard work we started.”