Some people can’t see the wood for the trees when it comes to environmental issues but reDirect Recycling has built its entire ethos on being able to see the big picture for sustainability.
Since its inception in 2020, reDirect Recycling and the Borg Group of companies has invested in infrastructure to produce new products from old resources and return them to market.
Everything about the business, right down to the name, is aimed toward landfill diversion, closing the loop on waste and conserving the environment for future generations.
“To us it’s not a waste, it’s a resource,” says Aaron Hudson, reDirect Recycling’s Chief Executive Officer.
“We’re not in the waste game. We direct our materials for another purpose – 99.4 per cent of our urban wood residues (UWR) are made back into product. We’ve opened a new paradigm to find waste a home.”
reDirect Recycling is the front collection, de-contamination and shredding side of Borg, an Australian-owned business comprising a group of companies including Australian Panels, polytec, Crossmuller, Space Urban, Bettergrow, Direct Pallets and Plantations Pine Products.
A home-grown success story, Borg has manufactured and distributed timber products across a range of brands for more than 30 years and supports sustainable, fully integrated practices throughout all its companies.
reDirect Recycling was born from a commitment to improve performance and the environmental impact on manufacturing products. The aim was to create a circular resource recovery solution integrated into other parts of the business.
State-of-the-art processing facilities across New South Wales accept different types of industry waste materials and achieve recovery rates of more than 95 per cent, creating a range of recycled products that are then used within the Borg Group or back out into the marketplace.
reDirect Metal Recycling collects and sorts metals recovered from construction and manufacturing sites. reDirect Recycling also operates one of New South Wales’ largest drill mud recycling facilities at Wetherill Park that is open 24 hours, seven days a week, returning treated mud fines and aggregates to be used as engineered fill, sand, specialist soil and fertiliser products.
reDirect Wood Recycling conducts waste management from collection and transport to treatment of pallets, mixed clean timber, particleboard, and picked engineered timber offcuts, with facilities at St Mary’s, Ingleburn, Wetherill Park and Somersby.
Closing the loop, Australian Panels manufactures the end-of-life wood back into two main products, CUSTOMpine and STRUCTAflor, for joinery and carpentry applications that are sold back into the market by polytec and Australian Panels.
Aaron says this is a circular economy success story for this type of waste timber streams – normally destined for landfill in New South Wales.
Wood waste makes up about 14 to 20 per cent of total waste going to New South Wales landfills each year, Aaron says. An audit of commercial and industrial waste streams for the NSW Environment Protection Authority (NSW EPA) found that more and more of this type of material is disposed of at landfill.
“This is a material that can be reused and made back into valuable building products and, more importantly, made in Australia,” Aaron says.
“It shouldn’t be going to landfill. Reclaimed wood is an environmental win. Not only does it reduce the demand for virgin material but reduces the methane emissions and leachate it would contribute if it was landfilled.
“The use of urban wood is key to Australia going forward to reach waste and emissions targets.”
Recycled wood has been used as a sustainable building product, such as flooring and in kitchen components, in Europe for the past 20 years.
In Australia, engineered woods such as Blue pine, plywood and black melamine plywood are typically landfilled because they contain adhesives that make them unsuitable for use as mulch for landscape purposes.
“In the past, the adhesives in engineered timber products led the EPA to say there were limited beneficial reuse opportunities for the products and thus permission to recycle it was not granted to anyone,” Aaron says.
“We were able to do multiple stack emission tests in our Oberon facility to prove that when we heat this engineered timber, then flake, feed and manufacture it back into particleboard and structural flooring, it doesn’t create any environmental impacts out of the stacks.”
It’s taken about four years for reDirect Recycling to scale up. In that time the company has built solid partnerships with many wood waste-related companies and is redirecting about 150,000 tonnes annually of about 400,000 tonnes of timber that goes to landfill each year in New South Wales.
The company’s uniqueness is that it is a vertically integrated company as part of the Borg Group that offers an end-to-end solution for waste wood, Aaron says. And it has solid foundations in Australian manufacturing.
“Australian manufacturers are hard to come by in terms of what we do,” he says. “It’s such an important part of reDirect Recycling to supply material in this integrated way on all levels.
“We use our own resources and facilities to stay Australian. We don’t send materials overseas to be reproduced and sent back here. The ethos is to stay Australian made.”
Aaron also contributes the growth to a change in the waste and resource recovery landscape. Landfill levies are rising, and big waste companies can no longer just cart and collect, there’s a need to find sustainable back-end solutions to dedicated streams of waste they collect.
Additionally, state and federal government procurement guidelines are changing to include an element of recycled content in products they purchase.
The overall scope of using waste resources and turning them into a product through an Australian manufacturing process is a real winner for the circular economy, Aaron says. But it hasn’t been without challenges. Contamination is often a source of frustration for recyclers and reDirect Recycling was no different.
Early on, many thought reDirect Recycling was a waste company and threw anything its way.
A strict contamination program and the signing of an individual Quality Control Plan by each company supplying waste wood, quickly sorted out the serious players.
Aaron says there were some occasions where reDirect Recycling declined to work with companies because of contamination issues.
“Australia’s ethos has to change when it comes to waste and the way it’s processed if it’s to become a resource for re-manufacturing,” he says. “Do you produce a good clean product that we will take at a third of the price of landfill prices per tonne and turn it into something useful, or do you want to mix it and do what everyone else does, and it will go to landfill?”
Providing a clean stream of materials is one area Aaron is keen to continue to improve. As well as the strict quality control program that all timber suppliers must sign, reDirect Recycling has invested in a cleaning tower at Australian Panels’ Oberon facility to ensure recycled wood is suitable for production.
“The quality process at Australian Panels is very high,” Aaron says. “Instead of using virgin timber we want people to use recycled timber when they can, but it has to be the same clean quality as virgin products.”
reDirect Recycling has three tiers of customers – cabinet makers or joinery companies who provide their timber offcuts; logistics companies who use timber pallets; and manufacturers who import machinery in plywood crates.
It’s also positioned itself to collaborate with the bigger players in the waste industry to process clean timber waste.
The company continues to grow. The aim is to hit 200,000 tonnes annually of timber waste diverted from landfill.
“At the moment we’re at our maximum. We’ve reached our quota for the first phase of growth for the integrated Borg Group and we’ll keep working with the customers who helped us get here,” Aaron says. “Phase two is more facilities, and more manufacturing plants to produce more product.”
And phase three?
“Watch this space.
“Current strategy – more facilities in more states,” Aaron says. “That’s an incredible story for a company that only started 35 years ago because two brothers, Michael and John Borg, didn’t think it was right to send wood waste to landfill.”
For more information, visit: www.redirectrecycling.com.au
