00:00 In a vast warehouse in Melbourne's west, Geordie and Julia Kay are conservation minded
00:11 entrepreneurs hoping by years end to have this very expensive, newly minted machine
00:17 turn out 10,000 tonnes of bio-friendly film for wrapping pallets.
00:22 Talking to one business alone they use enough pallet wrap to circumnavigate the world 10
00:28 times every year so it's just an immense scale of products.
00:34 Before this Julia was an architect, Geordie a winemaker.
00:38 Both of them encountered a lot of plastic pallet wrap.
00:42 Really we started as consumers of pallet wrap.
00:45 You know for me in particular in architecture I was spending a lot of time looking at the
00:49 materials I was building with, understanding their processes and wanting to use the best
00:53 materials possible and then often they'd arrive on site wrapped in this petroleum based plastic
01:00 pallet wrap which seemed to be a really big gap and for Geordie and I both using the product
01:06 so much we realised that if we could sort of change the materials that we were using
01:10 on this one product we could have a really profound impact on plastic waste.
01:14 I mean it's the connector of all business, everything that we're wearing or is around
01:21 us has been on a pallet at some point.
01:25 Well the dairy industry and retail and food and beverage and agriculture and then you
01:30 realise wow, pallet wrap's probably one of the biggest plastic problems our world is
01:34 currently facing.
01:37 This product is made from palletised potato waste.
01:41 From french fries and potato chips, usually it's used for cattle feed or it's spread
01:46 out in farmland.
01:50 Next year the couple aims to have a refinery built to utilise local waste from potato products.
01:57 Companies have made a lot of promises and they really want to meet these goals, it's
02:01 just for technology like ours it does take time and money to scale up.
02:08 The couple has set its sights on replacing another plastic, an eco-friendly silage and
02:12 hay wrap, and developing bioplastics that completely break down in the ocean.
02:19 They may be self-confessed idealists, but their quest, with the help of some of the
02:23 world's best scientists, is attracting strong interest here and abroad.
02:29 Julia and I are very ambitious people, very optimistic and probably a bit headstrong for
02:34 better or for worse.
02:35 I mean for us our goal is to put an end to petroleum plastic.
02:39 [Music]
02:41 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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