You know all that polystyrene you drop off at Kimbiriki Recycle and Recovery Centre?

It’s getting a new lease of life being recycled into green infrastructure projects and then reused again in a circular product economy. Unfortunately, polystyrene takes around 400 years to breakdown in landfill but what makes it terrible for landfill, makes it a perfect base medium for green infrastructure like greenwalls and greenroofs.

Take a look at the pots in your house, the soil will not be at the same height as when you planted them. This is because general potting mix will slump over time and needs to be topped up or replaced. This is fine, and a natural process of organics breaking down overtime. However, topping up your pots at home with organics is easy.

Green infrastructure on the other hand, can be a little more tricky. Greenwalls can be many stories high and fixed to the side of a buildings.  Greenroofs are exactly as they sound, a garden on top of your roof, not somewhere you want to be replacing soil or feeling the effects of slumping media.

The Greenwall Company has taken this concept and developed a patented growing media that uses recycled polystyrene as a base mixed in with 19 different other secret herbs and spices to create a growing media that will last the lifetime of the buildings they are on. The growing media is also incredibly light weight, helping to reduce unnecessary costly structural load requirements that further contribute to eCO2 emissions and cost.

If a product ever needs to come down when a design has changed or a tenant has moved on, our products, and your polystyrene, goes back to our facility for another life. The old growing media is put back into the mix with other media and rebuilt into new green infrastructure projects like greenwalls and greenroofs… Again..and again.. and again… Ultimately the reduction of polystyrene use is a great outlook, however, in the meantime while it is still being used in many applications the responsible recycling and reuse is so vital.

You can see first hand the structural are of the wall and how the plants survive?

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