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Oct 24, 2023

Tasman District Council to accept fewer plastics for recycling

Tasman District residents will no longer be able to put out some plastics for

Tasman District residents will no longer be able to put out some plastics for recycling from July.

Plastic types 1, 2 and 5 only will be accepted from July 1, which includes many food and drink containers such as soft drink bottles, milk bottles and ice-cream pottles as well as some kitchen and laundry product containers.

Like their Nelson City Council counterparts decided in December, councillors on the Tasman District Council strategy and policy committee on Thursday agreed to reduce the range of plastics accepted for recycling to the three types only, which represent an estimated 85-90 per cent of domestic plastic containers.

Those three types of plastics are recycled in New Zealand. The others – with the numbers 3, 4, 6 and 7 – are being stockpiled.

READ MORE: * Nelson council urges businesses and consumers to ditch more plastic * NCC takes 'ethical' stand on plastic recycling * Fast automated sorting system installed for Nelson-Tasman recycling

​Tasman District Council solid waste and stormwater team leader David Stephenson told councillors those other plastics were a "very small part" of the plastic stream. However, some including PVC (type 3) and polystyrene (type 6), were also used for some food containers and it could be hard to tell which were "good recyclable" plastics and which were not.

Stephenson had examples of plastic packaging including food containers and biscuit trays that were made from "good recyclable" plastics and others that were not.

Several councillors including committee chairman Kit Maling pointed out that the numbers were hard to read.

Councillor Dean McNamara said Stephenson's presentation demonstrated how difficult it could be to distinguish between the different types of plastics .

He raised concern that if it was too hard people might "just bin the lot".

"I'm not sure how that's going to help our 10 per cent reduction to landfill [policy]," McNamara said, referring to the Nelson Tasman Waste Management and Minimisation Plan, which has a target for 10 per cent reduction by 2030.

Stephenson said communication was important and there was a lot of parallel work happening around the country. A key message was for people to take care with what they bought and take care with what they recycled.

The Government was also "doing some work on labelling standards ... because it's been a really clear finding from some of the research that we've done across the country that the labelling is not clear".

In addition, the two large supermarket companies were "working proactively with their suppliers to make a change" such as moving to 1, 2 or 5 plastics.

"One of the most important things I think we can do is recruit our community to engage directly with retail chains and also with manufacturers because consumer pressure can actually change things," Stephenson said. "We are seeing that already."

On the other hand, a lot of "good, recyclable plastics" were being put into rubbish bins.

"These ... are valuable commodities that can be recycled right here, right now in New Zealand," Stephenson said.

Plastic containers are generally manufactured from one of six types of plastic and are often identified by a resin code, shown as a number between 1 and 7 shown inside a triangle: Those numbers mean:

1: Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is commonly used in bottles for soft drink, fruit juice and water along with plastic jars, cleaning containers, personal care bottles, meat trays, biscuit trays and plastic clam shells for fruit or bakery products. Recycled PET plastic from the Nelson-Tasman region is sent to Flight Plastics at Wellington for washing, chipping and re-manufacturing into plastic containers such as fruit punnets and clamshells.

2: High density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic is most frequently used in milk and cream bottles as well as kitchen, bathroom and laundry cleaning products such as trigger spray cleaners, dishwashing powders and dishwashing liquids.

5: Polypropylene plastic is most commonly used in ice-cream containers, takeaway containers and some soft butter, margarine and yoghurt containers.

Recycled HDPE and polypropylene products are sent to Comspec Plastics at Christchurch where they are washed, chipped and turned into pellets, which are sold for the manufacture of other products such as pipe and bins.

The other type 3, 4, 6 and 7 plastics are used in some food trays, squeezable sauce bottles, single-serve yoghurt pottles and other containers.

Kerbside recycling is collected fortnightly from about 19,200 properties in Tasman District and taken to the Richmond Resource Recovery Centre. Initially, three grades of plastic were sorted at the centre but an upgrade in late 2019 provided sorting based on image recognition and allowed for storage of six grades of plastics.