When she first opened, it was operating as My Eco Brockley, a refill store, with a mixture of food and household products. Charlie explains that the combination of the cost of living crisis starting to bite and margins getting slimmer and slimmer at the end of last year, she decided to remove the food and focus on toiletries, skincare and detergent refills. With the addition of the recycling hub, she turned the biz into Müll Club.

"We see great potential for our customer service, and in the long term for our training departments, in app technology," Wolfgang Degwerth, head of the customer service division at Engel Austria said in a release. "Thanks to e-calc, we have again simplified communication between Engel and our customers, and are now entering a totally new service era."

The word müll means rubbish in German and it’s a nod to her time spent with her mum who lives in Switzerland, where she first started getting serious about sustainability. “And it’s got a smiley face on. Double whammy,” says Charlie.

Beyond machine setup calculations, Engel envisions e-calc as a new extension of its existing customer service and training offerings.

Even though we know so much more about the size and scale of the problem now, there’s still a distinct lack of action. “Funding by central government to councils has reduced by something like 65% since 2010-2019, so all of that money is going to health and education and all of that stuff, understandably, but there’s no money in recycling. I didn’t get any support from the council,” says Charlie. “Councils also, there’s a whole push to be zero waste, to reduce the waste by 2030, and councils will quite proudly say ‘well we don’t send our waste to landfill’ but what they are doing is incinerating, which isn’t a solution. They say it’s safe but they also say the air we breathe is safe and we know that’s not true. And they make money, I think, off the back of that, and they don’t have to pay anybody either to take the waste. So I think it’s easy for them to incinerate for their stats, or for financial reasons, but all that does is ensure that we’ve still got demand on plastic. Then we have to keep making new, and that means we’re still supporting the fossil fuel industry. We don’t have the infrastructure because not enough attention has been paid to it.”

The frustrating thing is that the way Charlie recycles plastic is incredibly simple – the shredding and injection moulding machines she uses come at a cost, as do the product moulds, which are laser cut out of aluminium, but not prohibitively so. Once Charlie has collected the plastic (it’s mainly dropped off in a bin outside the shop, but she has plans to add more of them at Overground stations to make it more convenient for people), she washes it, shreds it, sorts it into different blends based on the colour, and injection moulds it into new items like soap dishes, coasters, combs, and candle holders. It takes about nine minutes for the plastic to be melted and moulded, with the whole process from plastic item to finished product taking around half an hour. “It blows your mind how easy it is, this isn’t some really technical thing, it’s something we can easily be doing in the UK en masse but we’re not,” says Charlie.

iMoulder app serves up mobile injection molding expertiseKeith Hague, director of Imtech Design Ltd., a U.K.-based Moldflow Gold Certified injection molding consultancy, created the iMoulder app in 2010, with versions for Apple and Android. Described as a "Plastic injection molding trouble shooter and materials guide," the app has three main areas:

At the same time, Hague said his wife, who is a children's author, had begun looking at eBook platforms and he seized on the potential for an electronic version of this trouble shooting guide. Hague estimated that there have been 40,000 downloads since the app's June 2011 launch, with 1000-1200 new users added every month, split evenly between Android and Apple.

e-calc app is available for Android smartphones in German and English, with versions for iOS and Windows Phone under development.

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Ultimately the goal is to grow and take Müll Club beyond Brockley and South London. “This is a test run in my mind to kind of understand the volumes of plastic, to prove that my idea can work as well because this is all new to me. It’s only a small bit of impact we’re really having right now. For my immediate community, brilliant, we’re really making a difference in terms of our plastic waste but I’d like to scale it so that other communities have the option. It’s about taking control of our waste, so I wanna offer it in more places,” explains Charlie. “The plan is to scale but really have an impact because we can’t wait for the government, especially if the Tories get in again.”

"An update for iMoulder is currently in the planning stage it will include a new user interface, a expanded material library and updates to the trade name and suppliers database," Hague said. User feedback is guiding some other potential changes, including:

It’s a space where “people can come in during the week, bring their plastic waste, so think yoghurt pots, butter pots, bottle lids, I shred it all up and recycle it into beautiful household items.” Anything that gets dropped up that can’t be turned into new products can be used for people to use containers for the refill store.

As well as selling the recycled plastic products, Charlie also runs workshops where people can come in and have a go at the process themselves, and “for people that do the workshops especially, but also those that come in and have conversations about it, it really changes their view of plastic, like it’s not a single use thing.” Obviously getting as much plastic out of the bin and turned into something useful as possible is important – Charlie has recycled more than 65,000 bottle caps worth of plastic since the autumn of 2022 – it’s also about winning hearts and minds. It’s “more about the conversation, so customers come in and bring it into me instead of the bin, so they’re like ‘I’ve got pink for you’. It’s changing the view so it’s not just a throwaway item, it’s something of value,” says Charlie. “I don’t know how measurable that is but that’s what I want to do, a conversation and mindset change as well as the amount we’re recycling.”

Hague told PlasticsToday the iMoulder's genesis dates back nearly a decade. "About 10 years ago I developed a simple injection molding process condition chart for a range of common materials, and this was well received by my customers," Hague said. "In the plastic consulting business, we get asked similar questions over and over from different customers, so I decided to put together a simple trouble shooting guide but was struggling to work out how to publish it and keep it pocket sized."

Hague told PlasticsToday that several material and hot runner suppliers have told him iMoulder is now standard field kit for their tech service engineers, which makes sense given its all-the-time accessibility.

Sustainability has long been part of Charlie’s story. As well as consulting for TV and film companies on how to reduce their carbon footprint, she had plans for a project to make the whole of Broadway Market zero waste, including getting a bubble barrier fitted in the canal to capture the plastic and then recycle it. Once the pandemic hit, she started doing vegetable deliveries by bike and then she had the idea of adding on refills. She cycled past the space on Harefield Road and decided to open up a shop.

Estimates of the total number of applications for Android and Apple vary, with some pegging Apple with more than 1 million apps in its App Store, while others estimate 775,000 for Apple and 800,000 for Android, but in any case, both now have injection molding programs mixed in among the Angry Birds and Words with Friends.

“Councils will quite proudly say ‘well we don’t send our waste to landfill’ but what they are doing is incinerating, which isn’t a solution.“

Estimates of the total number of applications for Android and Apple vary, with some pegging Apple with more than 1 million apps in its App Store, while others estimate 775,000 for Apple and 800,000 for Android, but in any case, both now have injection molding programs mixed in among the Angry Birds and Words with Friends.

Charlie is acutely aware that action has to be taken to address the plastic issue because we as a society have become so reliant on it – something that she lays at the feet of the government and big industry. “Plastic first started being used en masse during WW2, so all of this money went into the infrastructure, and then the war finished and it’s like, we’ve got all of this. And the fossil fuel industry wants it to continue because plastic is made with a by-product of oil and gas,” she explains. “It wasn’t really until the late seventies that people started thinking about where this plastic was going, but I don’t think anything was actually put into place until the nineties.”

Charlie has created a range of plastic shred blends, so she can create products in different colourways. The Stacy, named after a friend, features blue shampoo bottles, pink from Vanish bottles, purple laundry liquid containers and yellow from bleach bottles, and is the bestseller. There’s also Broca, named after her local coffee shop where she collects plastic from; Fancy, because the gold bits make it look fancy; Raspberry Ripple, thanks to its pink and white swirls; and Salt House, named after the yoghurt pots that started that blend off.

Slide rule no moreEngel, which had supplied customers with a slide rule for quick calculations, now has an app performing much the same function but in a decidedly more mobile format. The Austrian supplier of injection molding machines and automation said in a release that its e-calc app contains materials data for typical thermoplastics, including thickness factors, temperature conductivities, de-molding temperatures, permissible peripheral screw speeds, enthalpy values, and guidelines for processing loss.

The store is now open Friday – Sunday, with Charlie using the space as a recycling hub for the rest of the week, where she makes a range of recycled plastic products and runs workshops where people can come in and have a go themselves. “The whole message is that you bring in your rubbish and then you make something from it,” she says. “I’m quite political in my views and I like making stuff so this works for me, it feels like a new form of activism really.”

"The main concept behind iMoulder was that the app should contain all the information on the device and not rely on internet coverage so the user can access information equally well standing next to a molding machine on the shop floor or back at the office," Hague said.

At Müll, Charlie works with type 2 (HDPE) and type 5 (PP) plastic, though they can’t be mixed together. Not only do they not melt in the same way, the end plastic product then won’t be able to be recycled, whereas the items made from one individual type can be recycled again. That means if someone is done with one of Charlie’s creations, they can send it back for her to shred down and turn into something else.

“Something like only 12% of our plastic waste in the UK is recycled in the UK and we can’t wait for the government. The returns scheme for plastic has just been delayed so it’s probably not gonna happen until 2025, especially with a Tory government.” The outlook is pretty bleak but that’s not stopping Charlie Rudkin-Wilson, who’s taking action into her own hands with Müll Club, a refill shop and a plastic recycling hub in Brockley.

iMoulder has been a hit with users, pulling in 4.5 stars on Apple, with six reviews, and 4.8 stars on Android from 56 reviewers, with 49 giving it a full five stars. Apart from some suggestions, users offered up glowing comments, ranging from "use it almost every day" to "I love this app, thank you."