Written by Kerryn Caulfield, Executive Director, Composites Australia Inc
Powerful equatorial and regional currents and trade winds converge with complex tidal flows spanning thousands of islands and shallow seas in the Coral Triangle and flowing into the wider Pacific. The region’s countless bays, lagoons and mangrove forests act as natural catchments—retention zones where drifting debris accumulates in vast quantities, fouling otherwise pristine coastlines and fragile marine environments.
At the centre of efforts to turn this challenge into an opportunity is Geoff Germon, CEO of Talon Technology. An award-winning industrial designer and long-time entrepreneur in advanced composites, Germon is an alumnus of the University of Canberra’s Design School and a graduate in Economics from the Australian National University. For more than 25 years, he has built and managed businesses in the composites industry, developing solutions in carbon fibre and advanced materials. That solution-driven mindset now underpins his focus on plastic waste.
The plastic highway is not discerning. “What arrives on these beaches is not a single waste stream but every kind of plastic imaginable,” Germon explains. “We see PET, HDPE, PVC, LDPE, polypropylene, polystyrene—the full spectrum. They’re all mixed, degraded by sun and sea and impossible to sort in any practical way. That’s the reality we work with and it’s what drives us to engineer recycling solutions that don’t rely on perfect separation at the source.”
Rather than force low-grade waste into conventional plastics processing, Talon Technology rejects complex, capital-intensive systems and instead focuses on simple, durable processes that small communities can use. Under the Local Plastic Micro-factory model, unsorted beach plastics are compacted into thick cores and then wrapped in thermoplastic composite of fabric impregnated with recycled LDPE from discarded plastic bags. The result is a plastic–fibre composite material strong enough for structural applications and adaptable enough for everyday products.
This model is already being put into practice in Fiji, where Talon Technology has partnered with the Centre for Appropriate Technology and Development near Suva. Local trainees are learning to operate the equipment, turning the plastics washing up on their beaches into useful products for their villages.
Among the first products to emerge from Fiji’s micro-factory are solid plastic poles designed to replace conventional steel or concrete in light structural applications.
Each pole measures 3.2 metres in length and 60 millimetres in diameter, consuming around ten kilograms of mixed waste plastic. The plastic core is consolidated under heat and pressure, then wrapped in multiple layers of fabric impregnated with recycled LDPE, creating a stiff composite shell. Bend tests on 33.5-millimetre rods have shown failure loads of around 63 kilograms, with the outer fibre layers providing the majority of the strength—behaving more like a composite than a plastic. The finished poles can be coloured, camouflaged or patterned and offer a lighter, corrosion-resistant alternative that blends into the environment more effectively than galvanised steel poles.
Alongside poles, Talon Technology conducted a design exercise with second year Industrial design students that resulted in a planter box, each panel weighs 6 kg and besides offering a chance to beautify a space it is also a great sound absorber. The same composite process can also produce smaller consumer goods, demonstrating how even unsorted plastics can be converted into consistent, durable items.
“The creativity and applications are expansive. We’re making Frisbees, for example, from waste fabric and 24 layers of used plastic bags. The technology developed for the solid plastic pole is also being used to make cricket stumps with a mixed waste core and hemp fibre over wrap,” says Geoff.
A critical innovation underpinning these products is Talon Technology’s WasticFibre—a fibre-reinforced thermoplastic composite sheet made by impregnating fabrics with recycled LDPE from plastic bags. Wrapped around consolidated plastic cores, it delivers the strength, stiffness and surface finish of a composite material rather than a low-grade plastic part.
The Fiji facility is intended as a model for replication across other Pacific islands and remote communities. The manufacturing machinery is deliberately robust and straightforward, designed to be operated with minimal infrastructure. A unit can be installed for around US$80,000–150,000 and once established, it is largely self-sustaining, producing products that meet local needs or can be sold for revenue. This decentralised model avoids the costs and logistics of shipping waste to large recycling plants, turning plastic pollution into an economic resource at the village level.
Beyond the environmental benefit, Talon’s approach offers tangible economic and social gains. Training provided through local partners such as Fiji’s Centre for Appropriate Technology and Development gives young people practical skills in composite processing and small-scale manufacturing. By creating a pathway where waste becomes both a resource and a livelihood, the project weaves recycling into broader goals of resilience and self-reliance, embedding recycling into everyday life as part of a circular economy.
For Germon, the lesson is that plastic waste will not be solved by waiting for revolutionary technologies or by forcing mixed waste into the existing plastic molding industry. Instead, it requires a fundamental rethink: embracing unsorted plastics, designing products that use material in heavy sections rather than thin shells and applying composite engineering principles to achieve strength and utility. “You use it all or you don’t use it,” he says, capturing the philosophy that underpins Talon Technology’s work. In this way, the Pacific’s plastic highways become the feedstock for practical innovation, not just a symbol of environmental decline.
