After 13 years working as a professional, Emma Swabey decided it was time to change things up.
“I loved my job...I just was called to something else,” Swabey explained.
Originally from Sylvan Lake Alberta, Swabey is an agrologist and has had various jobs from working for the City of Calgary’s waste recycling department to being an environmental consultant. She moved to Williams Lake six years ago with her husband and has since worked in B.C.’s Ministry of Forests as well as the Wildfire Service.
Nature has always been a part of Swabey’s life, and she understood from a young age how important the environment is. What she didn’t understand was how people could so carelessly destroy it. During her post-secondary education, Swabey worked as a waste auditor for one summer, and loved it.
“I was like, I want to be the garbage queen,” she said.
When COVID-19 hit the world, Swabey began devoting her time to a growing interest in repurposing used plastic. It became more difficult to recycle during the pandemic, but she felt she couldn’t just throw plastic away.
“So, I just stockpiled it and then I started experimenting,” Swabey recalled. She had previously discovered the Precious Plastic movement, a growing community of people around the world finding and sharing ways to build plastic recycling networks and to give plastics a new life.
With this movement as an inspiration, Swabey set up a recycling studio in her home and tried different tools such as a burrito maker (which didn’t work at all), a toaster oven and eventually a pizza oven to work used plastics into something new.
“I kept trying,” she said, and she received lots of support from the people around her who were excited about a potential solution for the plastics they couldn’t recycle.
As she discovered the art of reshaping used plastic into something new, Swabey also began to reshape her career.
“I needed the machines to make it work,” Swabey said, explaining how an order of over 100 ski scrapers for the annual Gourmet Ski fundraiser took her two months to complete because she was making everything manually.
She took a leap of faith and applied for a grant from CleanBC’s Plastic Action Fund, with the vision of building a network to help tackle problem plastics in rural B.C starting right here in the Cariboo.
“When I got the grant, it was an amazing opportunity for me, it was a sign,” Swabey said.
She’s since ordered machines to help facilitate the process of repurposing plastics, and plans to make products such as ski scrapers, coat hooks and hair combs under the name Delve Recycled.
“I want to capture things that are not already recycled,” she said, listing items such as plastic lawn chairs, Fisher-Price toys and car seat bases which she often wonders what to do with when they break.
Swabey was encouraged to ‘shoot for the stars,’ and is excited to be embarking on a journey towards making the Cariboo a place where people are empowered to take action on climate issues if they feel called to it.
“I think there’s this growing anxiety around climate, our community has seen wildfire impacts...flooding impacts...empty grocery stores,” Swabey said. “One way to channel that anxiety for me is to do things in community to...either take action to prevent those things or to make us more prepared, so I’m inviting people to a group to see what it becomes.”
She’s still in the piloting stages, but Swabey is hopeful for the future. She’s been training as a facilitator so she can offer climate resiliency workshops and is hoping this can become part of Delve Recycled or be an additional project she takes on.
“I’m trying to figure out how to make a home for the work that I can bring to the world,” Swabey said.
