Ocean Crusaders are turning bottle caps into crab pot floats

Ocean Crusaders are turning bottle caps into Crab Pot Floats © Ocean Crusaders

Australia's Waterway Cleaning charity are at it again. We never seem to stand still. Having gone through the 100 tonne barrier of marine debris removed from Australian waterways already in 2020, we have now launched our Crab Pot Float Fundraiser where we will turn plastic bottle caps into hard plastic floats.

In SE Queensland alone we have access to 750,000 bottle caps a day, yep you read that right. If every cap came back, that's over 2 tonne of plastic that used to go to landfill.

In the clean ups we commonly find broken up crab pot floats and the worst part of that, the crab pot is probably lost on the bottom of the ocean and still fishing for crabs. One crab goes in, starves to death. Another crab goes in to eat that one and so on. On the odd occasion a turtle will head in and then it is game over for that turtle too.

We need to change our habits and polystyrene needs to go. We also collect thousands of bottle caps so why not kill two birds with one stone. We have set up collection points using container exchange locations from Noosa to Burleigh Heads. You can find a page on our website via the link below to see where your local drop off point is.

They are then brought back to one central place by Cleanaway, we pick up and bring back to our facility where we have amazing volunteers come along every Tuesday and Thursday to sort through the caps, separating whites (used for floats), metals and other debris. We then granulate the caps which can then be used in an injection moulding machine to produce our float.

We are now at the stage of needing to create the mould for the float which is a whopping $15,000 to create. Once we have that we can go into production and compete on price with those pesky little polystyrene floats that are simply an environmental nightmare. We are also chasing funding to move our facility to a dedicated indoor location as at present it is just in the back yard of a friends place, at the same place we have all of our cleaning boats. The machines are simply too loud to keep in a residential area.

Colored caps will later be turned into non-structural bricks, however the priority is our crab pot floats for now. And we need your help. We need to sell the first 2,500 floats through our Crowdfunder. www.indiegogo.com/projects/crab-pot-floats-from-recycled-bottle-caps#

If you support one campaign this year, make it this one as it will make a huge difference to our waterways, the very playground we all enjoy when we head out on the water.

NB: Whilst this is listed as QLD only, we are looking at ways to get bulk floats to other states. For more information visit oceancrusaders.org/Recycling

First stage of preparing plastic bottle caps for recycling - photo © Ocean Crusaders