With a rubbish heap of recent plastic headlines, Shanti Mathias explains what progress New Zealand has made – and how much further the international community has to go.
Plastic is everywhere, even when you don’t want it to be. It’s definitely in your house, covering the roads you cross thanks to car tyres shedding microplastics, and there are definitely plastic parts in whatever device you are reading this article on.
Action to reduce microplastics in New Zealand has encountered several setbacks recently. To stay in line with EU standards, fruit stickers will continue to be made of plastic until 2028, instead of being replaced by compostable alternatives by July 2025. Local company Harraways Oats changed its paper packaging to single-use plastic, advising concerned shoppers to dispose of the new packaging in the soft plastics bins that are at many supermarkets. “You will also have 100% confidence that your recycling is doing good with bin contents being reused to make things like plastic fenceposts for kiwi farms,” the brand wrote on social media, following an outcry at the change. Perhaps they hadn’t been reading the news that Future Post, the company that is supposed to turn soft plastic into fence posts, appears to take lots of its plastic to landfill – and, after being exposed for this practice, seems to now be accumulating plastic at its Auckland site.
What’s being done to stop plastic proliferating? There are some initiatives under way, but progress is slow. Here’s what you need to know.
Does the New Zealand government have any policies to reduce how much plastic we produce?
Yes, there are a number of initiatives in place. One is the phasing out of single-use and hard-to-recycle plastic. This began with the single-use plastic bag ban in 2019, with single-use drink stirrers and polystyrene takeaway trays banned from 2022, and plastic straws and cutlery in 2023. The third stage of the phase-out has been delayed to 2026, but is set to include all polystyrene food and beverage packaging and all PVC food and beverage packaging, although this is subject to Cabinet approval. There’s a reason these products have been picked – there are alternatives easily available – but walking into a supermarket in 2017 would have shown a lot more plastic available than there is now, so these changes have made a difference with minimal disruption to people’s lives (although making straws easy to access remains important).
Earlier this year recycling rules were standardised across all councils, including bottle lids no longer being accepted in recycling collections. This is meant to maximise the amount of waste that can be appropriately recycled, while making it easier to send non-recyclable items to landfill.
Penny Simmonds, the minister for the environment, has said progress is ongoing on a container recycling scheme that was abandoned by Chris Hipkins’ Labour government. So there is progress – it’s just slow.
Is the private sector doing anything about plastic?
There are lots of companies that want to reduce the amount of plastic we produce, or use recycled products, many of which have been enthusiastically profiled by The Spinoff at one time or another. Many of these companies’ efforts are making a difference; at the same time, there are concerns about greenwashing, where companies talk about environmental benefits that may not exist to improve their reputation.
Of projects that turn soft plastic into other materials, “They’re basically just distributing a landfill full of rubbishy plastic bags around the country,” Owen Embling, managing director of Hamilton-based plastic packaging company Convex, told The Spinoff in February. While the resulting product may look solid, the mixes of plastic additives can be unstable, and the plastic is often contaminated. Because plastic is so integrated into human and social systems, both at the consumer and business level, it can be hard to figure out who is being genuine in their efforts to use recycling or reduce plastic.
Given the volume of plastic, is all this stuff just tinkering around the edges? What is happening at an international scale to take action on omnipresent plastic?
It’s a good time to ask – we’ve just seen an example of how hard it is to come to an agreement about plastic, at an international plastic summit in Busan, South Korea. From November 25 to December 1, representatives of more than 200 countries met to try to thrash out an agreement to tackle plastic pollution, especially in the marine environment. The need for this treaty had been decided in 2022, with a two-year deadline set for defining the treaty, time that has now passed without any agreement being reached.
A bloc of more than 100 countries called for a reduction in the amount of plastic that is being produced (it’s currently on track to triple by 2050) but no one committed to a single option by the end of the summit. “New Zealand was part of two groups of member states calling for ambitious targets at the negotiations. Mexico led a coalition of 95 countries calling for plastic production reduction, which is a hugely ambitious piece of the puzzle that is desperately needed for an effective treaty,” said Trisia Farrelly, a Massey University professor and the coordinator of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, who attended the negotiations in Korea, in comments to the Science Media Centre.
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Russia, all major oil producers, worked to remove language from the treaty about who should pay for monitoring plastic use; insiders told the New York Times that Saudi delegates said that reducing supply of plastics “penalises industries without addressing the actual issue of plastic pollution”.
This is in keeping with big oil companies that have tried to increase the use of plastic, especially in low-income countries. (Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco is the fourth biggest company in the world). Big plastic producers, like Unilever, have made public commitments to reduce plastic while fighting to continue producing single-use plastic packaging. Plastic is made from petroleum, and many oil companies see it as a way to keep making profits while fossil fuel use decreases.
It’s depressing, but not all hope is lost. “Now that we’re seeing a majority of countries calling for high ambition and plastic production reduction, there’s hope that we’ll maintain that momentum at the next session,” Farrelly said.
