This country’s old, discarded plastic bags and bottles will soon be given new life as fence posts for farms.
Material from soft plastic recycling bins, which are at most supermarkets, has been sitting in storage since about September after the Australian company that was accepting it became inundated with too much plastic.
But the Packaging Forum, which runs the Love NZ Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme, has now partnered with new company Future Post to convert some of the stockpile into fence posts
Future Post was founded earlier this year by farmer Jerome Wenzlick who got the idea while struggling to build a fence on an old rubbish dump site. His wooden fenceposts kept breaking but hey weren’t hitting rocks, they were hitting plastic waste in the ground.
Future Post account manager Irene Ground said they were able to use plastics to create a fence post that was better for the environment, while also reducing the amount of plastic sent to landfill. A standard post could be made out of 208 milk bottles, or about 1700 single use plastic bags, she said. The final post would be about 10kg of solid plastic, expected to last about 50 years.
Lyn Mayes, from The Packaging Forum, said they hoped local and central Government would buy the fence posts whenever they were fencing farms, conservation land, parks or housing developments.
“There is no value in post-consumer soft plastics unless we create a value chain and we invest in it.”
By creating demand for posts made from waste plastic, they could supply Future Post with more and more soft plastic waste, Mayes said. The Packaging Forum would continue looking for more partners to widen the scope for recycling and soft plastics, she said.
our source – www.stuff.co.nz