Hi everyone,
Today's Sustainability Sunday newsletter looks a little different because today is Banish's 8th birthday! Banish started out of a personal need for quality information and sustainable action and it's grown into a movement.
I'll be honest with you, there were moments in those early years where I genuinely wasn't sure we'd get here. Building a sustainability education platform from scratch, in a space that didn't really have a blueprint (or exist when I first started), with no big funding behind us and a whole lot of stubbornness. It was hard. Really hard.
What kept me going? You did. And here's something most people don't realise: so much of what we've built at Banish has been powered by our community. People who believed in this before it made any logical sense to. People who showed up, literally, to my backyard to sort blister packs and bottle top lids by hand, then to the storage unit and our first and second Central locations. To unpack BRAD boxes, and give their weekend mornings to a cause they cared about. That's not a small thing. That's the whole thing.
Eight years on, BRAD has grown into one of Australia's largest hard-to-recycle programs, giving households, schools, offices and communities a way to responsibly recycle the items that kerbside bins simply can't handle. Blister packs, bottle top lids, beauty products, coffee pods — all of it finding a second life instead of a landfill.
This past year alone:
- 9.5 tonnes of items diverted from landfill
- 2 million+ items recycled
- 515,000 bottle top lids sorted by hand
- 3.5 million blister packs recycled since launch
- 10,000 households participated
Every single one of those numbers is a person who decided their actions mattered.
We've also moved into our permanent home this year, expanded our in-house production tenfold, and invested in the people and machinery to keep growing what is genuinely uncharted territory.
Nobody else is doing this quite the way we are — which means we're writing the guidebook as we go. It's messy, it's hard, and I wouldn't trade it.
People ask me all the time how I stay positive with the state of the planet. The answer is always this community. Banish exists to turn knowledge into action and BRAD is proof that when enough people take that action together, the impact is undeniable.
Thank you. For every box you've sent us, every lid you've saved, every time you've shared what we do with someone who didn't know we existed. You are the reason we're still here at 8.
Here's to year nine!
With so much love and gratitude,
