Although heavy industrial sectors like construction and resources have made substantial gains in terms of resource recovery over the last decade, the challenge now is to find ways to deal with smaller scale, and more complex waste streams, like hard hats and other safety gear.
The amount of rubbish produced in Australia has once again increased year-on-year, with the nation generating 75.8 million tonnes of waste in the 2020-21 financial year (close to a 2 million tonne rise).
The National Waste Report found commercial and industrial (C&I) sectors produced 43 percent of this, while 38 percent came from construction and demolition (C&D). While building and demolition waste boasts one of the highest resource recovery rates in the country at 80 percent, finding ways to recycle the remaining 20 percent poses a significant challenge.
Recycling solutions for construction and safety gear
There’s a good reason why hard hats have a high turnover rate. The Standards Australia mandate AS/NZS 1800-1998 requires all hard hats to be replaced within three years of their issue date to prevent deterioration, and in many cases worksite employees are provided with new equipment on every project.
The 1.3 million people employed in Australia’s construction industry alone will churn through more than 3.9 million hard hats over the next decade, just to keep up with the code.
With TerraCycle’s hard hat recycling solution, businesses can turn this unavoidable waste stream into a sustainability opportunity. Explore PPE solutions:
Why hard hats end up in landfills
Hard hats are made from mixed materials, usually HDPE (a type 2 plastic) and ABS, plastic or textile webbing and straps, with some including foam inserts. An item of this complexity generally isn’t accepted via traditional recycling services, as sorting and processing the different components usually costs more than the value of the recycled materials.
Since hard hats can’t be readily repurposed or reused in industrial settings like other waste in C&D or C&I sectors such as concrete, bricks and asphalt, they generally end up rolling around the bottom of the waste recovery skips, and are simply sent to landfills.
And it all adds up. An estimated 2.3 million tonnes of plastic was sent to landfills from C&I and C&D sources throughout the 2020-21 financial year – accounting for more than half of all landfilled plastic in Australia.
How you can recycle hard hats with TerraCycle
Since February 2023, TerraCycle has been recycling hard hats in Australia through the Hard Hats Zero Waste Box. This all-in-one solution accepts expired and broken hard hats, ensuring valuable materials are recovered instead of going to landfill.
The Hard Hats Zero Waste Box is an all-in-one recycling solution for expired and broken hard hats, which ensures valuable resources aren’t wasted. The price of the Zero Waste Box covers the production of the box, shipping to and from you, sorting, cleaning, processing, and recycling.
Once received, the contents of the full Zero Waste Box is inspected to sort out any non-compliant waste before the hard hats are sent to a processing partner. Here, the hard hats will be recycled in a number of ways depending on the specific material and the processor’s technology.
Hard hats can be shredded in their entirety before raw materials are separated to be recycled by material type. Plastic is the main component of hard hats, and can be separated into different plastic types using three methods:
- Sink-float separation, which uses water to separate commingled plastics based on density.
- Air density separation, which uses fans to create a column of air where low-density items like paper labels are blown upward and dense items fall.
- Optical sortation, which uses near-infrared sensors to record the light waves that bounce off items, allowing plastic shreds to be sorted by polymer type.
Webbing, straps, buckles, and foam can also be manually or mechanically removed before items are shredded and sorted using these methods.
What’s next?
Contact our team today if you want to keep hard hats and other waste streams out of landfills to boost your organisation’s resource recovery rate. You can discuss long-term, multi-site hard hat recycling solutions with our industry-specialised team by emailing them at anzsales@terracycle.com. Or, submit a quick enquiry at our recycling partnerships hub.
Explore our other solutions for hard-to-recycle personal protective equipment to remove more rubbish from your skips and ensure it gets recycled.
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