Woe betide anyone who tells Brent that their favourite football side isn’t the Western Bulldogs, such is his passion for the team.

Brent is one of the 30-plus crew who man the recycling centre of Ballarat Regional Industries in Wendouree. The not-for-profit organisation provides employment opportunities for people with a disability across two sites in Ballarat, including recycling and pallet-making services.

Entering the facility in Neerim Crescent, there’s an air of determined focus as the hi-vis and ear-muffed workers sort their way through mountains of paper or put together benches, park-tables and pallets.

A pink radio on the wall blares out pop-music. Facility manager Andrew Clarke turns it down as he shows us around the operation.

There are several streams of recycling that go on at BRI. Paper, both shredded and unshredded, comes in to to be further broken down into huge bundles of fine strips. Four or five staff busily unload wheelie bins full of discarded paper product onto a conveyor.

“You’d be surprised to know where most of this paper turns up next,” says Mr Clarke.

“It becomes the paper that is used in gyprock plasterboard.”

In a previous life Mr Clarke was a bootmaker, but he says the five years he has spent managing BRI have been the best thing he’s ever done.

“There’s not a day I don’t look forward to coming here. It’s incredibly satisfying, just seeing what these people achieve,” he says.

He points out a new plastic shredder and granulator due to be commissioned in the new year. BRI supplies garbage and recycling bins across the City of Ballarat, and also repairs them.

When they are too far gone for repair, they are destined for the granulator, to be turned into new products later.

There are also landscape and cleaning services offered by BRI, as well as the timber operation, which supplies pallets and packaging bother locally and overseas. 

In the ongoing debate about whether workers in disability schemes are being paid enough, Mr Clarke points out that if it were not for the opportunity that facilities such as BRI offer, many of the people employed would be sitting at home, requiring supervision and the efforts of family to care for them.

“What you or I may be able to pick up in three or four weeks on a job, these people might need months or even years,” says Mr Clarke.

“Realistically, in today’s job situation, they wouldn’t stand much of a chance. So here they get skills, they learn to work together and behave appropriately, and they get to do things they wouldn’t be able to do anywhere else.”