AUSTRALIA'S LARGEST CIRCULATING MANUFACTURING MAGAZINE
Issue 135 November 2023 $12.00 inc. GST
Peace & goodwill to all!
PEACE Alarming landfill figures lead to first locally manufactured plastic-free wipes By Margie Smithurst
least 30,000 tonnes of non-biodegradable plastic wipes go into Australian landfills each year – an “alarming” amount, says Scardigno. However, as he tells Industry Update, the true amount is probably much higher than that. “It’s scary… we’re worried about single-use plastic bags, cutlery, and straws, but this is far worse, and it sort of falls on deaf ears.”
Corey White (L) and Phil Scardigno, owners of Hygiene Co.
W
et wipes are big business. They’re used in the medical sector, for cleaning workplaces, and in the cosmetics market. They’re also used as toilet paper, sold as ‘flushable’ wipes. The majority – more than 95% – are plastic, non-biodegradable and imported. They’re also not flushable, as we’ve learned from the alarming ‘fatberg’ stories of gigantic mounds of wipes blocking metropolitan and household sewage systems. But it’s the landfill figures that flabbergasted Phil Scardigno and Corey White, who established Australian environmentally friendly wipes manufacturer Hygiene Co. in Adelaide in late 2021. When they started looking into it, they calculated that at
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From textiles to wipes Scardigno’s journey to manufacturer of plastic-free wipes began during Covid. At the time, Scardigno owned a business called Axis Manufacture that made coatings used with textiles in the construction industry, and was asked by the SA government to make wipes for the aged care sector because the supply and demand ratio was knocked off balance by the pandemic. He began producing perforated rolls of wipes for canisters but was prompted to investigate the market more broadly when he was told none of the 20 million packs of wet wipes used in Australian hospitals during the pandemic were manufactured in Australia. Post-pandemic, the opportunity came up to sell his coatings business and refit the building. Around the same time he met White, who came from the medical sector, and the pair started looking into manufacturing wipes. “The horrific thing that we both realised when we started to bring this company together was that it was all single-use plastics — thrown in Continues on page 44
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3/10/2023 2:08:03 PM