Where does your recycling go from the yellow-lidded bin?

Friday, 2 August 2019

A Christchurch recycling bin overflows - but is all of that actually recyclable?

That plastic in your hands makes a satisfying 'thunk' as you drop it on the other used objects in the big recycling bin.

The yellow lid slams shut and, apart from wheeling the bin a few metres to the street, you can forget about recycling until next time.

Journalist Lee Kenny checks city recycling bins for contaminants. (Video first published in June 2019)

But of course, you can't, or shouldn't, even though forgetting has been the time-honoured approach taken by many to their rubbish.

Unfortunately, your plastics haven't miraculously disappeared forever. That big bin is not an incinerator, a magic box or a time machine that makes the detritus of our consumer society vanish into thin air.

**READ MORE:

Raw bales of mixed plastics as imported at the Jakarta recycling plant.

* Christchurch City Council bails out EcoCentral recycling company

* NZ is 'very behind' the world in reducing plastic

Sorting conveyors in the background, with washing and chipping plants on the left and the first stage of product being discharged into bale sacks to be transferred for further processing.

* Recycling breakthrough as Environment Ministry works on drink container refund scheme

* China has stopped taking our recycling and waste. Here's where it's ending up

The plastic after first stage washing and chipping.

* $21m of NZ waste turned away from China

* A big zero: Was the soft plastic recycling scheme a waste of time and money?**

It is worth remembering that, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists today.

Plastic is defined as a range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic compounds which are malleable and can be moulded into many shapes.

Optically sorted product being loaded into a heating unit for melting to the consistency of toothpaste. It is then formed into strands and cooled in a water bath before chipping into final product.

In 1950, about 2 million tonnes of plastic was produced across the world. Now, more than 300 million tonnes of plastic are manufactured annually, but only about 10 per cent of this is recycled.

The total amount of plastic made across the planet between 1950 and 2015 is estimated at more than 7.8 billion tonnes, according to the Our World in Data website. Current plastics production uses around 6 per cent of the global oil consumption of about 93 million barrels of oil a day, roughly 5.6 million barrels a day or 2.04 billion barrels a year.

Examples of final products showing various colours and plastic types ready for export.

Environment Canterbury (ECan) councillor Lan Pham told Stuff most people now realised the 'idea of throwing something 'away' is a farce'.

'We're mostly throwing the problem to other countries, often far less able to take responsibility for the waste than we are in New Zealand.

The plastic product packaged for export.

'We can't keep kicking this mess down the road, or into the nearest landfill or ocean, for our kids and grandkids to deal with. It's just one more example of every level of society being complacent in pollution which we know will impact the environment and food chains of our generation and many generations to come.'

So where does our hard plastic – as opposed to soft plastics, like bags – go?

Some is processed in New Zealand and becomes part of other plastic products, such as drink bottles becoming meat trays. Much is sold overseas for processing and eventual further use. It all depends on the grade of the hard plastic, revealed by a number from one to seven within a triangle composed of arrows.

The Christchurch City Council (CCC) recently visited the recycling operations in Indonesia and Malaysia which take our hard plastics and concludes they are in good hands.

BY THE NUMBERS

In a nutshell, the city's clear grade 1 – PET (polyethylene terephthalate) – plastics are processed in New Zealand and only sold to Asian recyclers when the supply here exceeds demand.

Clear grade 2 – HDPE (high-density polyethylene) – plastic products are also processed and sold here.

However, our coloured PET and HDPE, and all grade 3 to 7 hard plastics, are sold to the plants in Asia.

When it comes to Christchurch's soft plastics – which the council defines as anything you can 'scrunch in your hand' – they are no longer being recycled, even though they can be.

Australian company Replas used to take Christchurch's soft plastics and recycle them into playgrounds, bollards, speed bumps, signs and similar objects. But the Melbourne processor was swamped by the large amount of soft plastics collected through the Love NZ programme and last year stopped accepting them.

Neither are soft plastics being recycled in Wellington.

But they are in Auckland, where its much larger population offers up economies of scale South Island centres can only dream about. Auckland's soft plastics recycling is an industry, rather than council, initiative, led by the Packaging Forum. Soft plastics are collected from several dozen Countdown, The Warehouse, and Huckleberry stores across the region and turned into fence posts and ducting for fibre-optic cables.

PLASTIC SENT OFFSHORE

At the end of June, CCC city services manager David Adamson and EcoCentral chief executive Craig Downie visited three recycling plants – two handling plastic and the other paper.

They inspected the processing complexes near Jakarta in Indonesia and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where Christchurch's grade 3 to 7 hard plastics are turned into a commodity that means less new plastic has to be made.

The hard plastics are tendered for sale by EcoCentral – the city council's recycling company. Contract lengths vary between about two months and a couple of years, but most are at the shorter end of the scale.

Adamson said the hard plastics were cleaned and sorted in New Zealand and then bundled into bales for shipping to those plants.

On arrival the plastics were washed and chipped, and eventually loaded into a heating unit which melted the plastic chips to the consistency of toothpaste. That plastic was then formed into strands and cooled in a water bath before chipping into the final graded and coloured pellets for export to the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to be turned into insulation.

Workers at the Jakarta plant appreciated the condition of New Zealand's hard plastics, he said.

'They like recycling New Zealand products, more than other countries', because they're reasonably clean. We run our processors well.

'Our rubbish is only as good as [how] people put it in the bin in the first place and whether they put the right things in the right bin.

'We get a far better product in the end and it costs a lot less to sort. There is very, very little waste from the product.'

Some Asian operations have been angered by the poor quality of imported recycling and have returned, or threatened to return, waste to its home country.

The Guardian reported last month that opposition to processing exported waste is growing across Southeast Asia.

Indonesia is returning eight containers of household waste to Australia, declaring the shipment to Surabaya too 'contaminated' by cans, plastic bottles, nappies and electronic equipment. It is also sending back 49 containers to France and other countries.

In May, the Malaysian government refused waste 'infested with maggots' from Australia and stated Malaysia would 'not be the dumping ground of the world'. The Philippines has also returned about 70 containers to Canada.

China sparked a mad scramble around the world when it decreed at the start of 2018 it was no longer going to accept 24 types of waste. Since the 1980s it had built a formidable waste processing and recycling industry and many countries took it for granted until the announcement, part of China's efforts to clean up its environment.

However, Downie said Christchurch recycling did not go to China pre-2018, but to its current markets.

Adamson said he was impressed with the conditions for workers at the Indonesian plastics plant and also by the factory's quality control and environmental standards.

The visit gave him confidence that what the council was doing with the city's hard plastics was 'reasonably sustainable' in the short to medium-term.

The Kuala Lumpur plant was newer than that in Jakarta – about 15 months old – and 'better laid out'. 'The environmental control systems for both water and air were similar to those we have in New Zealand.

'Staff were predominantly migrants living in hostels, but we did not look at the living conditions. We were told they were paid above local minimum wage and it was work locals were not interested in doing.

'Health and safety rules were evident and infringements tracked, with fines being issued for some infractions,' Adamson said.

SOFT PLASTICS DILEMMA

Recycling Christchurch's soft plastics remains a tricky issue.

Adamson believed one possible solution was the Government making soft-plastic recycling the responsibility of those making the products and 'paying the price on the product that is the actual cost to dispose of it'.

Pham agreed more direction had to come from beyond local government.

'It's my personal view that, aside from CCC and us citizens' moral obligations to change our consumption habits, it's well overdue for central government to legislate big business to take responsibility for their waste from production to disposal – be it water bottling, packaging, event cutlery and so on.'

Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage said the Government and the Ministry for the Environment were 'well aware' of issues recyclers faced with soft plastics and that 'manufacturers and retailers need to help find solutions'.

The ban on single-use plastic shopping bags had proved a 'great first step' in reducing the amount of soft plastics in circulation.

'Before the ban it was estimated New Zealanders used about 750 million single-use plastic bags annually. New Zealanders have quickly adopted to not using them, with Stats NZ figures out this week showing 96 per cent of households saying in January they were already using reusable bags.'

Last month it was announced that $40 million of the Provincial Growth Fund would go towards increasing the number of waste projects, including more onshore processing and recovery of waste, such as soft plastics, she said.

'I would encourage businesses to apply. There will be further announcements over the next two months.

Pham said better information was also needed on what happened to our waste products once the recycling bin was emptied, she said.

'We need to tell the full story of our failed recycling obsession and the true consequences of our waste generation, with a focus on massively reducing our product consumption in the first place.

'The onus needs to be on both the CCC and us citizens and consumers who have been too eager to consider our recycling efforts as the solution to our own consumption and waste habits.'