Let’s usher in a new industrial revolution in recycling

Saturday, 25 January 2025

Alex Matthews is a Wellington business person in the digital production/IT/games sector, an OCD sorter of recycling, and an avid futurist passionate about Aotearoa’s role on the global stage.

OPINION: Wellington faces some pretty interesting challenges when it comes to recycling. Necessity is the mother of all innovation and these challenges are opportunities that Kiwi innovators should look to with excitement and creativity on how to do things differently.

Not big enough to justify running our own large industrial scale facilities, in most cases we send our recycling to Auckland for processing, or it gets shipped overseas and sold to Asian businesses to turn into new products. This is well known and I believe a source of mild discomfort that sits just under the surface for most Wellingtonians. The city council provides a no-nonsense, transparent break-down of where our recycling goes and how it’s processed, with a self-aware, optimistic mention that the Ministry for the Environment is actively working to increase our onshore recycling capabilities.

We are, in my experience, passionate about good recycling and finding clever ways of re-purposing old things. If it’s turning an old sweater into a Christmas stocking, refurbishing old furniture, or creating art out of rubbish, the Wellingtonians I know seem conscious about minimising their impact on the environment and want to get good life and utility and out of the things they consume.

Whether it's community compost stations, banning of plastic bags, our thriving tip shop or our famous secondhand clothing stores, the signs of proud re-use are all around us. It’s also highly visible in the make-up of our business ecosystem. There are many enterprises and entrepreneurs focused on using recycled materials to create new things.

There are far too many to list but a few accomplished players that should inspire us are Little Yellow Bird, finding ways to reduce textile waste in clothing, or Pact Packaging running a multimillion-dollar recycling plant in the Hutt that not only processes plastics, but also designs new products for the horticulture industry. These are the kinds of businesses that create local jobs and solidify our brand as ethical business people who want to solve real-world problems.

Of course, the reality is that for many who attempt to innovate in this space, the going is tough. While researching this article, I made a list of all the Wellington start-ups I’d discovered over the years that produced recycled products or with recyclability in mind. It broke my heart to learn of how many of them were no longer in operation, including the much loved Wellington raincoats made by Okewa, or the savvy takeaway bowls made by Reusabowl.

This shows that we are keen innovators when it comes to attempting new things; but that finding enough customers, in what is truly a tiny market, is gruelling. Growing to the point of exporting internationally to foreign markets seems to be the way out of those problems, but getting that organic growth in the first place is a tall order.

This takes us to the real guts of the issue: what do we do about it? This series of columns has been looking at practical things we can do to empower the Wellington success story into the future, and in my opinion, embracing a special economic interest in recycling, recycled products, and sustainable design should be a key priority.

Firstly, we need to be looking at using or developing new industrial technologies that satisfy the smaller/mid scales of the market. We shouldn't try to compete with Auckland or southeast Asia when it comes to the scale-of-economy in recycling plants. Instead, we should look at small, modular, modern recycling plant systems that are designed for populations of less than 500,000 people. With this in mind, we could incentivise and even subsidise secondary and tertiary business initiatives that rework the material into new products.

If we take a holistic view that incorporates trends in 3D printing, low-cost robotics, and advanced open source software, we can create a harmonious resource loop that sees Te Whanganui-a-tara recycle, design, manufacture, consume and export, all within a small geographic area. This would provide opportunity for and make the most of our centralised talent, creativity, and ability to think forward. Perhaps one day we could even export our know-how to other small cities on how they could develop similar value-added micro-industries using the latest technology and methods of the day.

In the near future, I personally think recycling will approach science-fiction-like levels of advancement; whereby home-based 3D printers, easily sourced materials, and intuitive AI-enhanced software all come together to allow us to make many common consumer goods at home, locally or regionally. From dinner plates to furniture, toys, machine parts, tools and building materials, I think small-scale manufacturing will be an empowering paradigm shift that will also enable us to directly recycle more of our waste in our own homes. We could be global leaders enabling that future.

It’s a big dream, with a huge social investment needed, and I know I’m not the first person to have had it. If anything it feels written on the walls of Wellington like a collective ambition bubbling away in the background. But if we want to take advantage of our unique differences, punch above our weight, walk the talk of environmentalism, and have an impact on the global stage, this is the kind of ambitious thinking that’s needed.