The next phase of soft plastic recycling

The six-month soft plastics trial has been deemed a success, diverting 4 tonnes of wrappers from landfill.

Now, the scheme wants to take the trial to the next level but needs council support to do so.

The six-month trial was run by The Packaging Forum, which operates the voluntary Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme across the country, and while the trial was supported by the Nelson City Council, it was not part of the council’s regular kerbside recycling collection.

Around 1000 homes across 140 Nelson streets took just three days to register their interest in the scheme, which began in October.

Households participating in the trial were provided with orange soft plastic recycling bags and asked to put their soft plastics and wrappers into the orange bag and put it out for collection every fortnight, the day after the regular kerbside recycling operation.

Enviro NZ collect the orange bags on separate collection trucks from council’s kerbside collection materials, bale the soft plastic and deliver to Future Post in Blenheim to be recycled into fence posts, fence rails, signs, bollards and garden beds.

Lyn Mayes, Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme manager, says the purpose of the trial was to explore the viability of recycling soft plastic packaging at kerbside, and whether the collection model is economically viable and deliverable at scale.

Lyn, along with chair of the steering committee for soft plastics, Debra Goulding, presented to the council on Thursday asking for their support to take the trial to the next phase – making it financially viable.

Lyn told the council how 7366 orange bags had been collected over the six months. They contained a total of 4 tonnes of soft plastic, or about 600,000 individual bags or wrappers that would no longer head to landfill.

Of the thousands of bags collected, just 35 were rejected for having incorrect or dirty material, which Lyn says is a great achievement.

Future Post were able to manufacture 315 fence posts from the material.
What the scheme didn’t anticipate was the increase in collection at soft plastic drop off points across the region. New World, Woolworths, and The Warehouse collectively saw an increase of a tonne a month, meaning the trial raised awareness across the board.

“From the scheme’s perspective we are more than happy with what we achieved,” Debra says.

“The general awareness of this has upped the whole collection which is a good thing in and of itself.”

But now the scheme wants to continue the trial to make it more financially economical. Because they had to use a separate truck, the cost was “10 times higher” than ordinary kerbside recycling.

They have asked the council to be allowed to continue the trial with the same households, but this time allow them to put their orange bags on top of the yellow-lid recycling bins.

“We are currently awaiting the council’s decision; and will continue collections until we have the update from the council,” Lyn told the Nelson Weekly.

There will be no collections on Good Friday, 18 April. EnviroNZ will collect from all households on Thursday, 17 April.