Brickbats and bouquets in the mix as product stewardship schemes assessed

Sunday, 9 February 2025

New Zealand has let companies sell products without a thought for what would happen at the end of their useful lives. Depending on Government choices, 2025 could be a year that model comes under pressure.

A $10 million extreme temperature plasma plant is being built in the Kawerau region to destroy synthetic refrigerant gases in New Zealand, rather than having to ship them to Australia for destruction.

Some of these “F-gas” refrigerants are highly damaging to the environment if released - up to 10,000 times more harmful than CO2, the not-for-profit Trust for the Destruction of Synthetic Refrigerants says.

The trust runs the Cool-Safe scheme to collect and destroy refrigerant gases, paying industry to collect and hand gases in, with the scheme funded using the carbon credits earned from preventing their release.

“If a kilo of certain heat-pump refrigerant escapes, that's the same impact as burning 1000 litres of petrol in your car,” Cool-Safe says on its website.

It’s for this reason refrigerant and other synthetic greenhouse gases used in cooling systems and heat-pumps are one of the six “priority” products declared in 2020 by Jacinda Ardern’s Government in 2020.

But progress has been distinctly patchy on the development of the “product stewardship schemes” that were supposed to put an end to the unsustainable practice of companies selling their products with barely a thought for what would happen to them at the end of their useful lives.

It’s a model of business that’s left landfills overflowing, plastic and pollution in the sea, the soil, and even the human body. Just this week, enough plastic to comprise the average plastic spoon was found in the brains of deceased 45-50 year-olds by researchers at the University of New Mexico.

Luis Vayas Valdivieso, who is chairing negotiations for a global plastics treaty, calls on nations to agree to end plastic pollution.

It’s also left local councils with massive costs to deal with mountains of waste.

Product stewardship schemes for synthetic greenhouse gases, plastic packaging, tyres, electrical products (including large batteries), agri-chemicals and their containers, and farm plastics, were supposed to embed the price of responsibly disposing of end-of-life products in the price paid by consumers.

That money would be used to build systems and facilities to more responsibly deal with the country’s waste, to reduce the amount that was burned, buried or exported to become someone else’s problem.

This year could be a big year for New Zealand to play stewardship catch-up, having been left in the wake of Australia when it comes to drawing a line under polluting business models.

Go-ahead on F-gases

In late December, Environment Minister Penny Simmonds said the Government would be drafting regulations in 2025 to support an F-gas product stewardship scheme run by Cool-Safe, which has been doing its work since the 1990s.

Environment minister Penny Simmonds is progressing the F-gas product stewardship scheme.

On pain of penalty, the regulations would require companies engaged with refrigerants to participate in the scheme, rather than them having the choice of doing so voluntarily, or not at all to the cost of the environment.

The scheme was a key plank of action in reducing New Zealand’s climate emissions, Simmonds said.

The plasma plant, which will be operated by a company called Chemical Destruction Services, which is partly-owned by the Trust, should be up and running later this year.

Slow-going, but still going on single-use plastics

Late December also saw the Government “remove” the third deadline for phasing out hard-to-recycle and single-use plastics.

The cost of trying to collect and sort the torrent of plastic waste flowing from supermarkets and other shops into homes is left for local councils to fund.

In 2022, items like single-use plastic drink stirrers and some polystyrene takeaway packaging were banned. In 2023 plastic straws and single-use plastic tableware and cutlery were banned.

The 2025 deadline was to include all PVC and polystyrene food and drink packaging not covered by the previous phase-outs.

The Ministry for the Environment has now been tasked to carry out additional policy work to help the Government decide on the next steps.

The move was a disappointment for Sue Coutts from the Zero Waste Network.

“It sends the message that it’s not important. As soon as you take the pressure off, people stop doing anything about it,” she says.

Coutts says there are plenty of successful examples overseas of things like bottle and can-return schemes for New Zealand to learn from.

The tragedy is that New Zealand seemed so well-placed to be a world-leader when it developed a great waste minimisation plan in 2000. But successive governments let it languish.

“I think a lot of it is powerful lobbying,” she says. “Australia took our strategy, put their stamp on it, and are way ahead of us. We keep talking about things, but never do anything,” Coutts says.

Should National, whose environment, climate and local government ministers are all outside of the cabinet, decide to move, they have shown they could move fast, she says.

The last two Labour/Greens governments, which held power from October 2017 to November 2023, failed on that front.

Single-use plastic bottles are a thing of the past in some countries, but not New Zealand.

“The sense of urgency was not there,” she says.

But all hope is not lost.

A report on how to create a plastic packaging product stewardship scheme, including the levies needed on things like single-use plastic drinks bottles (think plastics with recycling numbers 1 through to 7) to fund it, has now been handed to the Government.

The report by the Packing Forum and the Food and Grocery Council, scoped out stewardship schemes overseas.

Tyre stockpiles and dumps were a feature of New Zealand before the Tyrewise scheme was launched.

It’s not been made public.

There is nervousness among some in the waste minimisation community that the Government is enamoured with burning waste to generate electricity as evidenced by plans for private waste-to-power incineration plant in Te Awamutu in Waikato, and in Waimate in Canterbury.

Burning tyres

The Tyrewise scheme has ended New Zealand’s failure to plan for the end of life of the roughly 6.5 million tyres imported each year to keep Kiwis motoring.

There are companies that manage and recycle e-waste, but still a vast amount ends up in landfill.

Since March last year, the country’s first regulated product stewardship scheme has collected nearly 1.7m tyres funded by levies on imported tyres.

Some are recycled into things like playground matting, however a large proportion are burnt as fuel to make concrete, which has helped Fletcher Building’s Golden Bay Concrete move away from coal and reduce its carbon emissions.

E-waste disappointment

E-waste is considered the fastest-growing waste stream in the world.

Nobody in New Zealand knows how much e-waste is collected and recycled, and design work on a nationwide e-waste scheme, and a large battery stewardship scheme, seem to have stalled.

Minister for the Environment Penny Simmonds says she’s taking advice from officials on getting work started again on establishing a domestic e-waste product stewardship scheme, and will be “setting priorities” over the coming months.

New Zealand is currently not among the 67 countries that deal responsibly with e-waste, and lags far behind Australia.

Between the Domes Catchment Group project leader Laurie Selbie (left) Agrecovery commercial manager Richard Carroll (centre left), Recycle South general manager Hamish McMurdo (centre right) and Thriving Southland catchment co-ordinator Clare Officer (right) check out recycled bale wrap.

Work had begun by the Battery Industry Group, including representatives from the car industry, on developing a large battery stewardship scheme, but its website is now out of date, with its list of people on the stakeholder working group including people no longer associated with it.

One who is on that group is Mark Gilbert from the not-for-profit Auto Stewardship New Zealand, which has been working on improving the end-of-life handling of the roughly 150,000 cars taken off the road each year.

Gilbert says the sharp drop in EV imports since the Government dropped subsidies had resulted in lower expected large battery numbers. Work was likely to progress again once the European Union’s requirement for all large batteries to have a “passport” to track them through their lives came into effect next year.

Regulation farmers don’t hate

Farmers have a reputation for flexing their muscle to fight regulation that affects their sector and costs.

But Anders Crofoot, chair of the AgRecovery Foundation, says there’s no lobbying against regulating for schemes to increase the collection and recycling of farm plastics and waste.

Last year, its Green Farms scheme was accredited by the Government, and this year (subject to Cabinet approval), Ministry for the Environment will consult on regulations to that will move it from being a scheme farmers can choose to be a part of, to making it compulsory.

The regulations will also put levies on products as they enter the market, with the money being used to fund and expand the AgRecovery scheme.

There are a lot of different plastics and rubbers used on farms from bird netting to chemical containers to plastic for hay baling.

Corfoot says: “We reckon from the hard plastics, we were getting 50% of what goes into the market, which is pretty pleasing.”

But there’s more that must be done. In Brazil, he says, the recovery rate is around 90%.