Environmental warriors and owners of Camp Hill Antique Centre and TART Cafe Sarah Jane Walsh and Paul Butler have committed a war on waste and are encouraging everyone to jump on board.
In 2009, Walsh and Butler opened their Antique Centre and Cafe which exhibits more than 70 antique dealers and sees between 4000 and 5000 people through the centre per week. Camp Hill Antique Centre is not a run of the mill retro and vintage home-ware or antique store evident last year when they turned over 4.5million in sales. Many of the products sold were stopped and rescued on its way to landfill, restored, repainted, re-chromed, re-upholstered, resold, allowing the same product to be recycled and reloved.
The Camp Hill Antique Centre has been recycling profitably for over nine years now and have delivered tens of millions of dollars of reused and restored products back to market. Therefore avoiding the need to have these items destroyed at landfill and also avoiding the need to produce another new product for the market. This double saving, the preservation of the original item and the subsequent offsetting of the need to produce and import another is the holy grail of recycling. Their efforts to save the planet continue as they have invested in 90kw of solar panels to offset the majority of their electricity needs and save tonnes of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere.
Walsh explains that the recycling story has so much going for it. “People feel compelled to cut down on the madness of waste and want to contribute to a lasting solution. However, that groundswell of goodwill has been given a sharp reality check of late. Much to our dismay we now see that our kerbside recycling endeavours are being thwarted by inept local councils and skyrocketing cost pressures that has seen recycled material ending up in landfill nationwide if you can excuse the pun – it’s a complete mess,” said Walsh. “Part of what is behind these failures is a lack of economic entrepreneurship to drive the process of recycling and reusing. As long as we continue to see recycling as a problem rather than an opportunity then the thing will never get off the ground.”
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