Wine bottles set to boost yields
Brisbane-based silicon fertiliser business MaxSil is converting pulverised wine bottles, jars and window glass into a powerful fertiliser for Australian agriculture.
The company is quietly confident their unique fertiliser will help achieve big yield gains for broadacre and horticulture croppers, particularly in soils degraded by salinity and acidity.
MaxSil's new $4 million, 15,000-tonne capacity plant in Brisbane's Moreton Bay area began commercial production of its silicon fertiliser last month.
Production commenced after years of pilot tests and crop production trials on cereals, sugar cane, greenhouse tomatoes, avocados, spinach, strawberries, and more.
It claims to yield up to 20 times more "plant-available silicon" than comparable fertilisers which use silicate-based slag and mined diatomite to help supplement what is now recognised as widespread silicon deficiency in many agricultural soils.
As much as 500,000 tonnes of glass is dumped in Australian rubbish tips every year because although waste glass recycling is widely supported by the Australian public, only a modest portion of disposed glass actually ends up being melted down and reused as new bottles and jars.
MaxSil, established in 2011 by David Archer, grinds glass of any colour into powder-fine particles about four microns in diameter.
It then converts those into fertiliser pellets to be applied with other granular fertilisers, applied as a foliar spray, slurried for furrow application, or as a seed coating. Patents have been granted to MaxSil Pty Ltd in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Belgium, and Brazil.
