Detainees at the Alexander Maconochie Centre have embraced lid-sorting work for Canberra charity Lids4Kids and they are gaining valuable experience in the fast-emerging plastic recycling industry.

Lids4Kids, founded by Canberra stay-at-home dad Tim Miller, has had a backlog of 10 million lids due to a lack of volunteers to sort them into polymer types. Seventeen detainees have embraced the job and sort through 70,000 lids a week.

Lids4Kids CEO Emma Holliday says a pilot program with the detention centre began six weeks ago and it’s proven so successful that the inmates requested more work.

“The detainees just loved it, the staff couldn’t believe how much they enjoyed it,” Ms Holliday says. “They were asking for more and now they’re looking to expand within the detention centre into more programs based around the rescuing of lids.”

Sorting lids is crucial to the success of Lids4Kids, as the quality of the polymer is essential before the charity can transform the small plastics into a valuable, sustainable product.

Once the colour sorting is done (by volunteers), detainees sort the seven different types of plastics (numbers 2, 4 and 5 are non-toxic and safe to handle and melt).

“They look identical so the only way to tell them apart is to hold them and feel them,” Ms Holliday says. “It’s the point in the whole process in which the lids become a valuable product because until then they’re still waste.

“It’s an absolutely crucial step, which is why we were behind in sorting because it takes skill and we just don’t have enough volunteers who have the capacity and time to do it,” she says.

“Every box always gets checked four times because we need a 99.5 per cent purity rate before we can process it. It’s very important work and it’s also the work that’s going to build this plastic recycling industry, which is a growing industry. People are reaching out more and more to purchase that raw material off us because it’s such a pure quality. Lids4kids are becoming known because we have that pure product. The detainees are making a massive difference to that.”

The detainees are so motivated that they have become self-organising, making up charts to help work out each polymer and type. Inmates are also feeding back information to Lids4Kids, teaching them new discoveries.

A spokesperson for the Alexander Maconochie Centre says detainees find it “therapeutic”, while others enjoy helping a not-for-profit organisation. One detainee has even drafted a design for a sorting table that enables more accurate and speedier sorting.

“They’ve spent a long time looking at the lids and studying them,” Ms Holliday says, “so they’re building on our program really beautifully. For us it’s transformative to have the detaineees in the program and it’s meaningful work that will actually lead to skills for employment.

“This is an emerging industry and we’ve got the machines, material and the knowledge here in the ACT to train them. When the leave incarceration they can start doing their own small businesses, which are popping up all over Australia and they’re actually leaving with that knowledge, capability and the connection.”

So efficient are the detainees, that for the first time in four years, Lids4Kids actually ran out of lids to sort. But Lids4Kids needn’t worry, three million more came in the following day from NSW.

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