THE work of Bob Williamson and his family has saved thousands of tonnes of plastic from going to landfill in Western Australia, earned international recognition and won a sheath of environmental awards. But, for him, that’s not enough.

The inventor who devised the world-first technology that recycles heavily polluting type 5 plastic – found in plant pots, furniture, crates and food containers – has just sold his business to focus on the fight against climate change.

With the proceeds of the sale of Pot Recyclers, Mr Williamson and his family have established the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation.

He hopes the not-for-profit foundation will “add a voice to the global push for change in the way we consume resources”.

“Finite means going, going, gone,” he says. “We are consuming resources that the Earth has taken 4.5 billion years to put here. I want people to understand how their actions can have far-reaching outcomes. We are not just killing off species, we are depleting resources to the point of extinction. How can we go on like this?”

The foundation’s public awareness strategy includes workshops where companies and individuals will be able to assess their “real” ecological footprint. A key element will be calculating a product or service’s embodied energy – the energy consumed by all of the processes used to get it to the consumer, from mining the natural resources to delivery.

“It’s not about making people feel guilty,” he says. “It’s about showing them all of the things we forget we are doing that create emissions. Do you know, for instance, that a laptop computer represents 18 tonnes of finite resources? We need to change business – and living – as usual. We have to have collective change because, if we don’t, we are going to leave a bleak world for future generations.”

Mr Williamson has written a book, Ground Zero – The Day the Lights Went Out, which he says “takes the science fiction out of science fact”.

“I woke up at 3.30 in the morning and imagined what would happen if all the world leaders decided we had gone too far and had said, ‘That’s it. No more man-made emissions are going into the atmosphere’. What would we do? It puts into layman’s language why we need to stop doing what we are doing.”

Before the Williamsons launched Pot Recyclers a decade ago, 100 million plant pots – the equivalent of 8,000 tonnes of waste and many thousands of kilowatts of energy – were sent to landfill in WA every year.

Central to the six-step recycling process invented by Mr Williamson is Polypropaclean, a patented substance that reverses the effect of UV light on the plastic’s chemical properties, allowing it to be reprocessed.

Australia uses 240,000 tonnes of polypropylene each year and nearly half of this is for packaging that can go from manufacture to landfill in as little as six weeks. Astonishingly, however, Pot Recyclers is still the only company in the country, and one of very few in the world, to recover and reprocess the plastic.

In January 2004 a Sustainable Energy Development Office study calculated that every tonne of Type 5 plastic recycled saves enough energy to power the average home for 5.3 years as well as 50 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. Creating one tonne of virgin polypropylene uses more than 10,400 litres of water, while recycling the same amount uses just 230 litres.

Pot Recyclers was recognised with last year’s Global Environment Award for Plastics Recycling, presented in Atlanta, and was overall winner of the WA Environment Awards 2004.

Mr Williamson has been a finalist in both the Prime Minister’s Award for Environmentalist of the Year and the Eureka Prize for Leadership in Business Innovation.

He hopes that the sale of Pot Recyclers to global waste management company SITA Environmental Solutions will allow the technology to expand throughout Australia and abroad. There has also been interest from China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia.

“I have high hopes for Pot Recyclers and I hope that bureaucracy and big business don’t get in the way of what I see as an essential service,” he says.