Nobel Innovations

At Nobel Innovations, we're turning campus waste into products. By creating a circular economy, we reduce waste footprints, while offering students & staff sustainable, locally made products.

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Inspiration: There are 52,000 cafes and restaurants in Australia which on average produce a combined 13 Million tones annually of HDPE waste primarily from milk bottles. Due to there size many of these milk bottles end up in general waste bins as often recycle bins fill up, and the ones that do end up in recycling bin only 20% of the milk bottles actually are recycled.

What it does: At Noble Innovations Waste-to-Wonder, we're turning campus waste into campus pride. We collect HDPE plastic waste from cafes and other sources across the University of Newcastle's campuses and transform it into eco-friendly products like pens, key rings, reusable water bottles, phone cases, and tote bags—all sold at the university merch store. By creating a circular economy, we reduce waste and carbon footprints, while offering students and staff sustainable, locally made products they can feel proud of. Together, we can close the loop on campus waste, one plastic item at a time."

How we built it:Through Research completed in our course BUSN 3002B we reached out to many cafes to validate the issue where many cafes did not have a sustainable waste stream for the hundreds of milk bottles the throw out each week, we then met with Jess Hodges from resourceful living to investigate how we can turn HDPE plastic into valuable sprouts to sell an what systems are required for the operation. We are now at the stage of seeking output for the waste in terms of finding what specific products organizations would like us to produce for them from the Milk bottle waste we are collecting.

Challenges we ran into: We found it hard at first to get in contact with the cafe owners as they did have busy schedules but we found that email or meeting in person during non peak periods was the more efficient way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of: The team at Nobel Innovations has engaged with a variety of stakeholders in the circular economy and hospitality space in the last 9 week speaking to over 10 cafe owners, members of the Hunter Joint Organisation, Resourceful Living, and IQ Renew has helped us gain a deep understanding of circular economy space in the Hunter.

What we learned: Over 52,000 cafes and restaurants in Australia are producing 13 million tones of waste primarily from milk bottles. It has been an ongoing concern in the industry as we try to reduce waste plastic in Australia.

What's next for Nobel Innovations: Noble innovations seeks an output for the waste streams we have identified, currently local cafes has expressed to us that they would like us to collect the HDPE plastic but we are looking for business like the University of Newcastle to purchase products we create from the waste plastics , which can be customized into merchandise

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