Plastic free July: Plastic bottles are unnecessary, and yet people keep buying them

Wednesday, 3 July 2019

Plastic bottles may be the easiest thing to ditch during Plastic Free July - environmental advocates say they're pointless anyway. 

Sustainable Coastlines co-founder Camden Howitt said plastic water bottles  were an unnecessary product, but they spawned a colourful array of plastic lids, plastic rings and lid seals on beaches. 

'Kiwis care about the beach and they care about their environment, but unfortunately we're disconnected from the issue,' he said. 

'We think that if we drop rubbish on the street it disappears or someone will pick it up. 

**READ MORE:

* Plastic pollution and landfill emissions 'unacceptable' advocates say**

* **Plastic free July: One coffee cup at a time

* Plastic Free July: Life before plastic**

'Unfortunately, that's not the case … it will go down the drains and end up in the environment.'

The small lids, rings and seals from bottles could be worse than the bottle itself - they slip out of sight under driftwood and seaweed. 

'We can drink the water from our taps pretty much anywhere around the country, but we've been marketed to think that we need this bottled water and we really don't need it,' Howitt said. 

Several groups are already working to remove plastic bottles  from the environment.

Kiwi Bottle Drive campaigner Holly Dove said anyone over 35  could remember bottle deposit schemes in New Zealand, and she's campaigning to get them back. 

'It made fundraising and recycling really fun and it was a good way to care for the planet every day.' 

It took more than two decades of campaigning, but this month the Government announced the Ministry for the Environment planned to 'look in to' re-establishing a scheme. 

This month Tasmania announced it would introduce a scheme, following the rest of Australia bar Victoria, and last year both Scotland and England  did too. 

Dove said New Zealand was lagging behind other countries to establish a deposit scheme, but they were expecting an announcement within six months. 

This time the scheme would be modernised for New Zealand and would also accept aluminium cans and plastic bottles, as well as glass. 

'In the past it was just glass, but it's looking like the future is plastic.' 

Kiwis consume about 5 million packaged drinks a day, but currently only 35 to 45 per cent of 'recyclable' beverage containers are actually recycled.

'At best, half of these containers are being collected [for recycling] each day,' Dove said. 

'If we had a bottle deposit scheme, we'd be seeing  a collection rate of 85 per cent or above.' 

RefillNZ is working to reduce the amount of plastic bottles in the first place by encouraging cafes to offer free refills for personal drink bottles. 

It started in Wellington last year and is now all over New Zealand, with more than 130 RefillNZ sites in Wellington. 

RefillNZ volunteer Breanna Ward is a lifeguard at Kilbirnie Pool and collects the hundreds of reuseable water bottles that people leave behind, sterilises them and then offers them to pool users.  

'We hope that by teaching people about the impact plastic has, they'll make the choice to refill the bottles they already have and stop buying single-use plastics.' 

Ward said Plastic Free July challenged people to reduce their plastic use.  

'Going plastic free for a month is great because it encourages people to stop consuming plastics fullstop.'