By Celsias Team
Posted on Oct. 15, 2010. Listed in:
A clever Kiwi invention is helping to lower the carbon footprint of a café in the Catlins. Called ‘The Oppressor”, the machine is anything but oppressive. It’s more of a case of impressive. The Whistling Frog Cafe & Bar paid $4000 for the machine, which, when fed glass bottles, reduces glass bottles from their full state to a fine sand or grit in a matter of seconds. The machine is the brainchild of Expleco Limited, a New Zealand based Research and Development company specialising in the volume reduction of glass bottles and the storage and sourcing of new and existing uses for glass sand.
Being so remote and not served by Clutha Recycling Centres, the cafe has been looking for a 'green' alternative to this waste management problem.
How effective is it? Well for starters, one 80 litre rubbish can full of assorted bottles, can be converted into a safe 15 litre bucket of sand, which can then be used as mulch, concrete mix or road fines around the McLean Falls Holiday Park.
The cafe is offering the service to Papatowai locals who can bring down their bottles to the Café, which will be recycled using the machine for less than they were paying to have them removed from the district. This will further reduce their carbon footprint and save on shipping costs. The fee will help to pay for the replacement parts to keep the machine operating at peak performance.
The beer, wine & champagne bottles need to be clean, have caps and metal neck liners removed prior to recycling. The Oppressor does the rest.
Paul Bridson, owner of the Whistling Frog Cafe & Bar, says it’s one of the first machines to really address the enormous problem of bottle waste generated form restaurants and holiday parks.
This is so AWESOME!!!
Written in October 2010