What to Do With Old Trophies in Australia

The facts, before you start

• Australian kerbside recycling bins take paper, cardboard, metals, unbroken glass bottles and jars, and firm plastics. Brisbane City Council explicitly asks residents not to put broken glass in the yellow bin (Brisbane City Council).
• Contamination is a real cost, not a technicality. Cairns Regional Council found more than 1,500 tonnes of non-recyclable material in its yellow bins in 2025 — 14.8% of everything collected (The National Tribune, 2025).
• Metal is worth separating. Australia recovered 87% of its scrap metal in 2020–21 (National Waste Report, released December 2022, via Planet Ark's ACE Hub). Australia's national plastic recycling rate, by contrast, has stalled at around 13% (Australian Plastics Flows and Fates reporting, via Recycling International, 27 August 2025).
• Fair Game, one of Australia's best-known sports equipment charities, will not take them. Its donation page lists "trophies or medals" under what it cannot accept (Fair Game).
• Scrap metal drop-off is usually free. Brisbane's resource recovery centres accept residential quantities of recycling and reusable items free of charge, including steel, tin, iron, copper and aluminium (Brisbane City Council).
• Op shops do take bric-a-brac and homewares. Both Salvos Stores and Vinnies list bric-a-brac and homewares as welcome. Neither lists trophies either way, and both refuse cracked or damaged goods.

Old trophies: what to do with each part

Why are old trophies so hard to get rid of?

Because a trophy is not one thing. A typical mass-produced trophy is a plated zinc figure, on a plastic or MDF column, bolted to a stone or moulded base, with an engraved aluminium plate glued or screwed to the front. That is four or five materials in one object, joined by a bolt.

Every recycling system in Australia is built around single-material streams. Mixed-material objects fall straight through the gaps. So the trophy sits in the cupboard, because throwing it out feels wrong and recycling it isn't offered.

And there is a second reason, which has nothing to do with materials. It has someone's name on it.

How do you take an old trophy apart?

This takes about two minutes per trophy and it is the single most useful thing you can do. You will need a Phillips screwdriver, an adjustable spanner or pliers, and a flat blade.

Step 1: Remove the engraved plate

Most engraved plates are held on with two small screws or double-sided tape. Unscrew them, or slide a flat blade under one corner and work it free. If the plate is glued and won't budge, a hairdryer softens the adhesive. Keep the plate — the metal is recyclable, and some people like keeping the plates as a record and letting the rest go.

Step 2: Separate the figure from the column

Turn the trophy upside down. Almost all cups and figures are held on by a single threaded bolt running up through the base into the figure. Undo the nut underneath and the whole thing comes apart in your hands.

Step 3: Separate the column from the base

Same bolt, usually. If the column is glued directly to the base, a firm twist or a tap with a mallet will break the glue line. Plastic columns often snap at this point, which is fine — they were going to general waste anyway.

Step 4: Sort into piles

One pile of metal. One pile of timber. One pile of stone. One pile of plastic, resin and MDF. Now each pile has an actual destination, which it did not have five minutes ago.

What will Australian op shops take?

Op shops will generally take a trophy the same way they take any bric-a-brac — if it can be sold. Salvos Stores and Vinnies both list bric-a-brac and homewares among the donations they want, and both are clear that they cannot use damaged or cracked items.

The problem is the engraving. Vinnies will not accept embroidered school uniforms or company uniforms because personalised items don't sell, and the same commercial logic applies to a trophy with a stranger's name on it. A plain glass award or an unengraved base has a much better chance than a 1997 under-11s netball trophy.

Two practical rules. Ring the shop first — acceptance varies store by store, and both charities say to check locally. And never leave anything outside a closed op shop. Charities spend real money sending unsaleable dumped goods to landfill.

Councils also run reuse shops. Brisbane City Council's Treasure Troves take good-quality second-hand items for resale, and donations are assessed on arrival.

Will schools or sporting clubs reuse old trophies?

Sometimes, and it is always worth the phone call, but do not assume it. The honest position in Australia in 2026 is that most organised programs have closed. Fair Game, the well-known sports equipment charity, states plainly that it cannot accept trophies or medals.

Where reuse does happen, it tends to be informal and local:

• The organisation that awarded it. Perpetual trophies get re-engraved and reissued every year. If the trophy came from a club, that club is the most likely home for it.
• School woodwork and art programs. Plain timber bases, columns and plaque blanks are useful raw material.
• Kindergartens and early learning centres. Plastic figures become props. This is a real second life, even if it isn't recycling.
• Men's sheds and maker spaces. Solid timber and stone are always welcome.
• Buy Nothing and Facebook groups. The single highest-hit-rate option for a whole trophy, because someone doing a school production or a themed party genuinely wants it.

What can go in your kerbside recycling bin?

Very little of a trophy, and getting this wrong makes things worse rather than better.

The yellow bin takes paper, cardboard, metal cans and packaging, unbroken glass bottles and jars, and firm plastic containers. It does not take drinking glasses, crystal, ceramics, mirrors, mixed-material objects or small loose metal items. Brisbane City Council specifically asks that no broken glass go in the recycling bin at all, because it is a safety risk to sorting staff.

Contamination is measurable and expensive. Cairns Regional Council reported 14.8% of its 2025 kerbside recycling was material that should not have been there — over 1,500 tonnes. A trophy tossed in the yellow bin does not get recycled. It just costs somebody money to pull back out. The mechanics of why a sorting line rejects a trophy, and which components are genuinely recoverable, are set out in whether trophies can actually be recycled.

Where do the parts actually go?

• Metal: council resource recovery centre or a scrap metal dealer. Planet Ark's Recycling Near You lists zinc among recyclable scrap metals, and notes that many councils offer free scrap drop-off at community recycling centres. In Brisbane, residential quantities are free.
• Timber: reuse first. Solid timber has value to anyone who makes things. Failing that, check whether your council takes clean timber for mulching or biomass.
• Stone: reuse. Stone is inert, so recycling isn't the question — a second use is.
• Glass and crystal: drop-off facility, not the yellow bin.
• Anything electronic: e-waste. Brisbane accepts all e-waste including batteries free at its four resource recovery centres, and warns that batteries in wheelie bins cause truck fires.
• Acrylic, resin, MDF, plastic: general waste, after you have genuinely tried to give it away.

The honest answer: a lot of old trophies cannot be recycled

I would rather tell you this than pretend otherwise. Once you have pulled the metal and the timber and the stone out of a box of old trophies, what is left is plated plastic, thermoset resin, MDF and glue. None of it has a recycling pathway in Australia. It goes to landfill.

That is not a failure of effort on your part. It is a design decision made by whoever ordered the trophy, years before it reached you. An object built from five bonded materials was never going to come apart cleanly at the end.

Which is the whole argument for buying better in the first place. There is more detail on the technical side in our companion piece on whether trophies can actually be recycled.

Why do people keep trophies they don't want?

Because it was never about the object.

I have had this conversation with a lot of people since starting Bloom Cycle, and it is always the same shape. Nobody is attached to a plastic figure on a plastic column. They are attached to being fourteen, and the drive home afterwards, and a coach who told them something they still remember. The trophy is just where the memory got stored.

That is why the guilt is real when you go to throw it out, and why the object almost never deserves it. A trophy that goes in a cupboard for twenty years and then in a bin has done a poor job of holding something that mattered.

That gap is the reason Bloom Cycle exists. I started in a shed at home, making awards out of reclaimed Australian timber, because I could not accept that recognition had to arrive as landfill with a name on it. The whole idea is to make things worth keeping — a piece someone puts on a shelf on purpose, in a material that gets better with age rather than worse, that can be repaired, and that can be reused or recycled when it finally has to be.

You can read more about why we started Bloom Cycle, or the bigger picture in our guide to sustainable corporate awards in Australia.

If you are the person in your organisation who orders the awards, you are the one who decides what somebody has to deal with in twenty years.