News — Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme

As New Zealanders we collectively loved the Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme. We dropped off our plastics at the supermarket to be collected for recycling but too many people took too much waste and we overwhelmed the Australian recycler to the point that they turned NZ’s soft plastics away. A New Zealand based recycler was announced and then the scheme was abruptly put on hold.  Recycling soft plastics seemed like a silver bullet – we could eat the same packaged foods without feeling guilty about creating landfill waste, or ocean plastic pollution. But the problem with recycling being proposed and sold as a solution is that...