Recycling glass bottles turns into a community project for Flinders Island community

In one of the most remote places in Australia, a community gathers.

There are bottles of wine galore: chardonnay, pinot, sauvignon blanc — boxes and boxes of the stuff.

Only all the bottles are empty.

Anne Rae and Bronwyn Stubbs have earplugs in and their guests are wearing face masks. A machine is switched on and it's so loud you have to shout to be heard.

Flinders Island, north of Tasmania in Bass Strait, has a waste problem — and locals in the town of Killiecrankie are taking things into their own hands, one bottle at a time.

Bronwyn grabs a bottle of decent-looking chardonnay, tips the last few drops onto the garage floor and hurls it into the glass-crushing machine.

"It's quite satisfying," Bronwyn shouts.

"Who wants a turn next?"

Each bottle is churned by the special glass crushing machine. The bottle goes in, and then out the bottom of the machine, into a tub, falls the cullet.

The sparkling recycled material is like sand, you can run your hand through and it is coarse but not sharp, just like sand at the beach.

Residents of Flinders Island are using the sand in all sorts of practical — and fun —ways.

"We are using it on our paths, we use it to mix into soil for gardening," Bronwyn says.

The crushed glass sparkles through the orchard and crunches under foot.

Their neighbour Jude Cazaly is using the crushed glass to smooth her driveway.

"Slowly but surely my potholes are being filled. I have a gravel drive and with a bit of traffic the potholes appear. I've got to snaffle my share of the glass to fill my potholes," Ms Cazaly says.

"It's a very slow process, just this pothole here was probably six boxes and a small wheelie bin of bottles."

"We've even had children use the sand as glitter in art," Anne says.

The recycled glass is also being used in local cement manufacturing.

Killiecrankie resident Bill Godbehere is a retired industrial chemist.

"The concrete on our island is made from a coarse sand and we've found if you add about 15 per cent crushed glass it makes it stronger and a better consistency and you can get away with less cement in the mixture," he says.

In a year of having the crushing contraption, about 6,000 bottles have been crushed and used around the island.

The recycling team has been reassured that the crushed glass is safe to use in the garden.

"It's really innocuous," Mr Godbehere says.

"It has a nuisance value, as in you don't want to breathe anything into your lungs. But if you do get some dust into your lungs while you're crushing, it's not going to cause silicosis."

The Flinders Island tip is running out of room. In an estimated three to six months the island's hole will be full.

"At the moment, despite our best intentions everything really ends up in the cell, or the hole as it gets called, all together in the ground because we don't have the facilities to deal with our rubbish in other ways," Mayor Rachel Summers says.

Rachel Summers has a plan for the island that involves finding a use for almost all waste.

"We need $5 million to develop a rather radical plan," she says.

"You'll drive into the tip and we want a thing called a waste wall. It has special slots for things like your toothbrushes, batteries. Hard waste would be your first stop, other people can take what you don't want.

"The first priority will be reuse. There would be a spot for cans, bottles, organics, we would make compost. So after all these drop-off points, by the time you get to landfill there would be very little. You will only pay for what you put in the landfill."

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