MAKING GOOD CITIZENS 2.5 years ago, Sydney dad Nik Robinson took a massive gamble and started a plastic recycling idea with his two kids, Harry and Archie, and successfully invented a way to turn a discarded 600ml single-use plastic bottle into a pair of sunglasses. Yep, 1 bottle = 1 pair of sunnies. No screws, no metal parts, just one recycled bottle (except the lenses) aptly named Good Citizens! And what’s even cooler is they also make the cases and cleaning cloths out of 100% recycled bottle plastic too which is all processed in Australia. Plus the frames are made right here in Sydney. We chat to Nik about this awesome adventure and what it means to have his kids involved
First of all, tell us a little bit about you, your wife and the kids.
Tell us about the kids involvement and what it means to them.
My wife, Jocelyne, and I both grew up in the UK but we’ve both been here for 20 odd years so we feel very at home in Australia now. We live in Sydney with our two boys aged eight and nine. My wife has a public relations background and I’ve had a few careers - radio presenter, creative director and head of content for an entertainment company. Before this, neither of us had any experience in retail, manufacturing, recycling, plastic polymers or creating transparent supply chains, so it’s been a steep learning curve.
The kids have been brilliant at keeping things simple. We adults can over complicate everything. We scribbled down four guiding principles. Every decision gets run through the filter of these principles together with our very simple purpose - to untrash the planet. We ask ourselves, “Will this action untrash the planet quicker?” If so, it’s usually a yes. For example, when we designed the dispatch box for the glasses, we designed two. One was simple and cost 65c, the other was a fancier one that cost $2.80. The kids decided to go with the simple box and use the money we saved to pull plastic waste out of the ocean. We call it the unfancy box.
How did the idea for making recycled glasses come about? The kids were learning about plastic waste at school and they came home upset that the world was drowning in plastic waste. As a family we’d often talk about the issue and wondered what could we do to help. After we agreed that we’d do something, I spent every day for a solid four months researching. Plastic bottles are an incredible menace when discarded thoughtlessly. Over 500 billion are made every year and only 7-9% are recycled; the rest end up in landfill and the ocean. We took a 600ml PET bottle and studied it, weighed it and explored products we thought could be made from that bottle. Glasses won. The plastic of one 600ml bottle makes two arms, the frame front and the hinges.
34
What sort of impact has Good Citizens had so far on the environment? So far, we’ve prevented over 5,000 bottles from going to landfill and we’ve pulled 1.35 tons of plastic off beaches and out of the ocean. Our story has been told in publications around the world and we estimate over 16 million people have seen it. This starts a conversation about how trash can be turned into something good and stylish and it makes people think twice about buying a bottle in the first place.
The glasses are designed to last forever by offering replacement parts. How does this work? The design of the hinge makes the glasses modular which means every frame part can be replaced and fixed in seconds. For the first year we’ll replace any part for free (apart from the lenses) and we’ll recycle the old parts.
