24 June 2024

TAFE NSW has helped a former public servant secure a brighter future for her booming recycling charity and win two prestigious awards.

Berowra’s Rebecca Healy, 44, has had a long-held passion for sustainability, prompting an unlikely career pivot in 2021 when she packed in her public service job to launch a plastic recycling charity, Boxhead Plastics.

The charity’s extraordinary success has seen it grow from recycling 1.2 tonnes of plastic waste in 2021 to having recycled 96,000 tonnes less than three years later.

The mum-of-one turned to TAFE NSW Lidcombe before starting the charity, finishing a Certificate IVin Polymer Technologies to gain the hands-on skills and knowledge to work with recycled plastics. Eager to make charity, Boxhead Plastics, as sustainable as possible, Mrs Healy again turned to TAFE NSW in 2022, enrolling in a Diploma of Sustainable Practice.

“I’ve always been interested in sustainability; I’d be picking glass and cans out of bins even before recycling was in fashion,” Mrs Healy said. “With a growing population and more demands on the earth’s finite resources, sustainability is more important now than ever.

“I quit an amazing, secure, well-paid job to start this charity and collect scrap plastic waste from the automotive industry. Boxhead Plastics main focus area is plastic car bumper bars,” she said. “Since 2021, our wonderful volunteers and myself have collected 27,000 car bumper bars for recycling, turning them into products such as golf tees and coasters.

“What I’ve learned from the TAFE NSW Diploma of Sustainable Practice has been instrumental in the growth of Boxhead Plastics and has helped me to benchmark ourselves not just on local frameworks, but against international ones. It’s helped with reporting and a lot of the sustainable policy and procedural stuff.”

Capping off her remarkable career transformation, Mrs Healy was this month honoured with the TAFE NSW Excellence Awards Student of the Year, along with the Agribusiness Student of the Year award.

“I owe so much to TAFE NSW and my teachers who were such experts in their field and so dedicated to seeing me succeed,” she said. “Being able to study the course online was also unbelievably good. I was able to self-direct and having a young family at home, I could put my son to bed and then do my study.”

A recent study found more than half of Australian consumers now consider sustainability an extremely or slightly important purchase criteria when shopping, while Linkedin’s Global Green Skills Report found sustainability managers enjoyed the largest jump in job openings in the sector between 2016 and 2021, growing 24 per cent nationally.

TAFE NSW Diploma of Sustainable Practice teacher Belinda Bean said Mrs Healywas a great example of the powerful difference building sustainable practices into an organisation can make. She said organisations worldwide were increasingly recognising the value of putting sustainability at the core of their business.

"Bec’s recognition as Student of the Year is a testament to her dedication to sustainability,” Mrs Bean said. “As demand for green skills continues to outpace supply, her achievements underscore the critical role education plays in preparing future leaders for green jobs.”

Students study the course online with a project-based learning approach and strong support from teachers and fellow students. The course has eight subjects and can be completed in one year full-time or two years part-time.

Media contact: Dan Johns, TAFE NSW Communications Specialist, Daniel.johns9@tafensw.edu.au, 0477 722 428