Everything you need to know about the new nationwide recycling rules.  

What’s happening? 

From today, new recycling measures are in place. Recycling is now nationally standardised: the rules about what you can and can’t recycle are exactly the same around the country, with only a few exceptions.

Under the new rules, you can recycle these things only (and they have to be clean and bigger than 50 mm): 

• Glass bottles and jars
• Paper and cardboard
• Aluminium and steel tins and cans
• Plastic bottles and containers of plastic types 1, 2 and 5

Why are the rules changing? 

Because they were confusing! The rules were different all around the country, which led to a lot of recycling contamination, where stuff that could have been recycled had to be thrown out because it was mixed with things that can’t be recycled. The packaging doesn’t help: a “7” inside a triangle with arrows is a mark of what kind of plastic it is, not that it can necessarily be recycled, and sometimes recyclable plastic bottles are covered in non-recyclable soft plastic. Some places took lids; others rejected crumpled cans. It’s all about what items sorting machines can recognise. 

As much as you might like to think that you’re great at recycling, understand resin numbers perfectly and never leave food in the containers you put in the bin, the mix of rules mean that lots of the stuff in recycling bins ultimately just goes to landfill. Many public bins marked “recycling” actually end up being mixed with the rest of the rubbish because they’re almost always contaminated. 

Why weren’t the rules standardised in the first place? 

Kerbside recycling was slowly adopted in Aotearoa, with North Shore City Council (RIP) being the first to have full recycling in 1990. Because different councils started processing things at different times, using different contractors with different tools and technologies for separating recycling, there have always been recycling inconsistencies. After public consultation in 2022 (also linked to the decision to have food scrap collection available across the country from 2030) the Ministry of the Environment told all councils that they had to standardise from February 1, 2024. 

There are a few exceptions: Clutha, Hurunui and Westland District Councils still can’t recycle glass, and Gore still can’t recycle some paper and plastic. These councils have been given until 2027 to build this capability. All are rural South Island councils with small ratepayer bases; the Gore recycling plant is literally run by 90-year-olds. 

OK so… what can’t I throw in the recycling bin? 

The standardisation means that in some places what was recyclable is no longer. Auckland previously accepted aerosol cans (like your Lynx body spray), “liquid paperboard” (the non trademarked name for Tetrapak juice and milk boxes), and lids. Under the new rules, none of these will be accepted; lids, in particular, are too small to be picked up by most sorting machines.

Because recycling has been promoted as a good or moral thing to do, there’s a tendency to “wish cycle”: to put things in the recycling because you’d like to think they’ll be magically revived by the recycling process, regardless of whether they actually will. Hopefully having uniform rules around recycling will make contamination less common. According to Shaun Lewis, waste systems manager at the Ministry for the Environment, about 16% of items placed for recycling currently can’t be processed, and 13% of waste in rubbish bins can be recycled. 

Where does my recycling go after it gets taken away? 

The recycling is transported to a plant where it’s sorted into different types. This is a really helpful video of the VISY plant in Onehunga which processes all of Auckland’s waste, separating paper, glass, metal and plastic. It’s the biggest recycling plant in the country. Human sorters remove non-recyclable items, then magnets and machines that can identify the plastic types divide the types of recyling. 

Glass is recycled in Aotearoa, as is most aluminium and cardboard. Glass and metal are relatively easy to recycle, as they can be cleaned and then melted into new products; however, every time you melt plastic, the molecule chains get shorter and the plastic is degraded (this is why milk bottles, which are usually made from recycled materials, are opaque, while virgin plastic is clear). Similarly, the fibres in paper get shorter each time they are processed, making them less strong unless you add in new wood pulp to mitigate degradation.

Recycling is a complex, expensive process, and New Zealand doesn’t have the capacity to process all our waste here. In 2022, 50% of paper and 45% of plastic was shipped overseas. In 2018, China stopped accepting plastics from other countries; it had previously received about 70% of the world’s plastic waste. Countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam also started limiting plastic imports. 

If it’s so hard to recycle, is it actually worth doing? Does it make a difference? 

For people who make their money from the waste industry – it’s worth $1.5 billion in Aotearoa – there is certainly still value in recycling, recovering resources from the raw materials that make up the stuff we throw out. 

In the excellent book Wasteland about the global waste industry, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis asks the same question. Recycling is energy-intensive; there’s a reason it’s last on the list of “Five Rs”: refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle. He wonders if recycling is simply a form of “busy-ness” to distract us from the sheer volume of often unnecessary packaging we use and produce – especially since recycling was originally promoted by plastic companies to avoid plastic bans. The waste we create as individuals is only a small amount of what is generated by industry and construction, so not putting the wrong things in your recycling bin is only one piece of a big puzzle.

However, there’s also good reasons to try to recycle when possible: it’s less energy and resource intensive than having to mine and manufacture materials when they’re new, especially since new plastics come from oil extraction. It’s a way to take individual action while pressuring councils, companies and governments to restrict the use of plastic in the first place, like the UN global plastics treaty that tries to make polluters pay and prevent rich countries from exporting their trash to poor countries. Effective recycling is one (small) part of a future where less stuff needs to be thrown away in the first place. New Zealand’s new, standardised recycling is expected to divert 36,000 tonnes from landfill each year.