Perfume, rugby players, rivers, and parts of India have all inspired collections of street names in different New Zealand cities. (Image: The Spinoff)
Shanti Mathias scrolls through council archives and Papers Past to discover where street names come from.
In Sydenham, a suburb south of Christchurch’s CBD, there are some familiar names on the road signs. Milton Street. Coleridge Street. Wordsworth Street, which, naturally branches into Shakespeare Road. There’s Tennyson Street, of course, and Shelley Street.
Walking around, or even just looking at a map of the area gives me vivid flashbacks to first year English literature papers at uni. Am I trying to get to Yogiji’s Indian Food Store on 32 Wordsworth Street or frantically highlighting “I gazed—and gazed—but little thought” in the hope that having lots of colours on the page will help me understand poems? Am I taking a wrong turn from Longfellow Street onto Tennyson Street or agonising about submitting an essay with a comma in the wrong place in “Alfred Lord, Tennyson” [sic]?
Once you notice a theme in street names, it’s impossible not to spot more and more of them. James K Baxter Place is clearly named for the poet. But are Manhire Street and Mansfield Street also named after Bill and Katherine respectively, increasing the representation of New Zealand writers among dusty British figures?
The Bard reincarnated as a street name in Christchurch and clost to syllabus buddies like Milton and Wordsworth. (Image: Shanti Mathias)
Not so, unfortunately. According to Christchurch City Council’scomprehensive street names origin resource, Manhire Street is named for Bethel Prinn Manhire, a paperhanger and glazier who was also mayor of Sydenham. Mansfield Street, meanwhile, is named for Kate Mansfield Peacock, the wife of John Hickman, MP for Lyttelton from 1868-1873.
Many of Sydenham and Addington’s themed streets were given their names from the 1870s onwards, when Sydenham was established as a borough and the first University of Canterbury students were being assigned Wordsworth et al for their English essays. An article from Christchurch’s Star newspaper in 1909 records a mass renaming of streets in Christchurch to prevent confusion. Within the central Christchurch area, there were “three Church streets, a Church road, a Church lane and a Church square”. There were also lots of duplicate names, where streets in the central city had the same titles as thoroughfares in newer suburbs, so a mass renaming was approved by the Christchurch City Council. Thousands of tidbits like this are in the Christchurch street names list, saving anyone curious about local history from having to poke around Papers Past themselves.
Most councils have some information about street names, although it’s usually presented as context to prevent people naming new streets from creating double-ups. It accompanies local bodies’ naming policies – being consistent with a theme is one part of Christchurch’s policy.
90’s All Blacks: as good a street name theme as any (Image: Screenshot/Google Maps)
Auckland’sstreet names index, from Aarts Avenue in Manurewa to Zurich Place in Leabank, has some blank records and stabs in the dark – “Winthrop is presumably a surname” reads the record forWinthrop Avenue in Māngere East – but is also a great starting place for learning about local history. It reveals lots of themed names, too, from streets named after birds in Point Chevalier (Moa, Huia, Kiwi and Tui) to the Flat Bush subdivision where roads are named after All Blacks who played for Auckland or the Blues (Michael Jones, Frank Bunce, Eroni Clarke, Ofisa Tonu’u, Robin Brooke).
Some newer developments have even zanier patterns for street names. Clover Park in Auckland has a cluster of streets named for perfume and make-up manufacturers, some misspelt. The effect is similar to walking through duty free while severely jet lagged. There’s Diorella Drive, Arden Court and my favourite, Shalimar Place.
It’s fun to read the speculation on Auckland Council’s website about the winery-inspired names of a section of Flat Bush. Mission Heights Drive may be “quasi-Californian” but is “more likely a reference to the Mission Estate Winery, New Zealand’s oldest winery, established in Hawkes Bay by French missionaries in 1851.” Someone was definitely reading the Road Naming Guidelines with some tipples in front of them: nearby streets are named Vin Alto, Brancott, Fairhill and Leburn – surely a misspelling of Le Brun.
Agra, Shimla, Delhi and the Ganga River inspire road names in Khandallah, Wellington (Image: Google Maps/ Screenshot)
In Wellington, there’s no single list of street name origins but some great context in the city council’s “Street Smart” series from its resident historian. Lots of suburbs have themed names: streets in Khandallah are named after parts of India (Delhi, Punjab, Calcutta), streets in Island Bay are named after rivers (Tiber, Rhine, Thames, Danube) and streets in Brooklyn after American presidents (McKinley, Jefferson, Garfield). Honestly, seeing the commitment to themed street names is kind of a relief. It’s nice to see subdevelopers and city councils having some fun with it among the fresh tarmac and drying ink on resource consents.
Of course, there’s a flipside to naming streets: once a name is established, it’s hard to change, even if it’s necessary. Maori Road in Takaka was changedfrom Black Maori Road in the 1960s, when residents complained that it was named after a slur. Wellington’s Te Wharepōuri Street in Berhampore was changed from “Waripori”in 2020 after residents raised concerns that the name was a misspelling of Te Wharepōuri, a Ngāti Tāwhirikura and Te Āti Awa chief who signed te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840 in Wellington Harbour. However, the original sign had to stay up for some time afterwards, as seen in this photo from the Wellington City Council archives, to prevent confusion if, for example, emergency services had to access the street and couldn’t figure out where to go due to the name change.
That shouldn’t prevent cities from renaming roads, especially if it makes things clearer. Speaking as someone who once got off a bus in Church Street, Onehunga, when I was meant to get off that same bus in Church Road, Māngere Bridge, I think that there are limits to usinggeographical or municipal features as road names – clearly repetition of “church” names isn’t just a 19th century problem. Maybe some of thehundreds of Park, Beach, Church, Bridge, Mill and River roads and streets could be replaced by something new, or something themed. New Zealand writers, perhaps. Members of the Black Ferns’World Cup-winning 2022 squad. Great New Zealand snack foodinventors.Birds, bugs or fishthat have won quasi-democratic annual competitions. Street names are bite-sized pieces of local history – why let them be mainly occupied by distant monarchs and dusty mayors?
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New Zealand sends most of its recycling offshore, to places like Indonesia and Malaysia. Michael Neilson visits the communities dealing with the consequences.
In a tiny village in East Java, Indonesia, two children laugh as they tumble down small piles of what could easily be autumn leaves in New Zealand, playfully throwing handfuls at each other. Except it’s not leaves that crunch beneath their feet, but millions of tiny pieces of plastic scrap originating from all over the world, including New Zealand.
Outside almost every home in the village of Pagak are small hills of plastic scrap, originating from wastepaper imports contaminated with plastic. After China’s ban on waste imports in 2018, Indonesia has risen rapidly to become one of the world’s top recipients of wastepaper for recycling, taking in about three million tonnes a year, according to its Bureau of Statistics.
Children play in a pile of scrap plastic in the East Java village of Pagak (Photo: Michael Neilson)
More than half of New Zealand’s wastepaper for recycling is sent offshore. In 2024, New Zealand exported 259,000 tonnes, with the majority – about 150,000 tonnes – going to Indonesia. The country has a 2% contamination limit for imports, but local environmental organisation Ecoton says it has found contamination up to 30%. This contamination generally occurs due to poor sorting before export.
After the wastepaper bales arrive at Indonesia’s paper mills and are processed, this plastic, generally dirty and low-grade, such as pet food packaging and baby food pouches, is separated and provided to communities near the facilities. Local workers sort through it to find any remaining wastepaper that can be sold back to the recyclers, with the remnants burned.
While most of the plastic is unrecognisable due to degradation, it doesn’t take long to spot items from all over the world: a coffee bag from France, beer packaging from Australia, and even a Pams 1kg sugar wrapper with “Made in New Zealand” proudly displayed on the front.
Marsiah and Harmiadah of Pagak collect scrap plastic from the paper mill to pick through for any salvageable material (Photo: Michael Neilson)
Nearby the playing children, their mother Hamidah and grandmother Marsiah are bent over in the sweltering midday heat, sifting through the plastic for any tiny pieces of paper and cardboard that might not have been successfully separated from the scrap plastic before it was given to the communities. They dry out any remnants found before reselling to the paper mill.
The family, one of about 900 households in the wider area that receives scrap plastic from the mill – there is even a waiting list – say they make about NZ$100 a month, which supplements the crops they grow.
Also in the village is a giant open limestone kiln, where several men tend to a huge fire they say is burning 24/7 to soften the stones above. It’s fuelled entirely by the same imported scrap plastic. Kreteks, or clove cigarettes – a staple of Indonesian culture – hang out their mouths, also burning constantly, the sweet cinnamon smell balancing the thick, acrid black smoke from the fire that pierces nostrils and makes eyes water, as those very children play on the street just metres away.
A man in Pagak tends to an open limestone kiln that burns 24/7, fuelled by plastic waste scraps (Photo: Michael Neilson)
These fires are known to emit alarming levels of dioxins and hazardous chemicals and ultimately infiltrate human food chains, including through the ash, causing respiratory diseases, hormonal imbalances, and reproductive disorders. Another kiln site, visited by The Spinoff, has a football-field-sized pile of plastic ash along the Brantas River, which supplies irrigation and drinking water.
“It’s tiring and dirty and very low paid, but there are few opportunities here,” says Ahmad Yani, a waste collector himself and waste management activist for the village. He says people are not aware of the health risks of burning plastic and microplastic contamination, but he doubts there would be resistance if the government tightened regulations. “They just want jobs.”
At a tofu factory in the village of Tropodo, scrap plastic from recycling imports is burned as a cheap source of fuel (Photo: Michael Neilson)
Further north in the town of Tropodo, thick black smoke fills the horizon also, but this time it is emanating from the 60 tofu factories in the area. Tofu producers collect this same type of scrap plastic from other paper mills nearby – also reliant on wastepaper imports – and burn a trailer load daily to cook soybeans.
A local tofu factory owner says they have used plastic fuel since about 2010 because it is free and burns easily, as opposed to wood and gas. He switched to a combination of plastic and coconut husks in the past few years, but not for health reasons, rather so the smoke would be less black and attract less attention from authorities. Uncontrolled burning of plastic is illegal in Indonesia, but regulations are rarely enforced.
Tests by East Java environmental group Ecoton found microplastics in tofu from nearby markets. Ecoton was involved in a multinational 2019 study of eggs taken from chickens that roamed through the plastic ash sites at Tropodo, which revealed that eating just one of these eggs could exceed the European Food Safety Authority’s safe dioxin intake by 70 times. A 2024 study that included other sites in West Java returned similar results.
“Dioxins from burning plastic accumulate in the environment and enter the food chain,” says Dr Daru Setyorini, Ecoton’s executive director. “These chemicals persist in the body and cause long-term damage.”
Despite Indonesian authorities pledging investigations, Setyorini says public awareness remains low. “Most people don’t know what microplastics are, let alone how harmful they are.
“My message to the developed countries is recycling is not effective. They should not burden developing countries to manage the rich countries’ waste.”
Ecoton executive director Dr Daru Setyorini identifies a piece of scrap plastic in an illegal dumpsite in Pagak (Photo: Michael Neilson)
In neighbouring Malaysia, the situation is equally dire. This is where most of New Zealand’s plastic recycling ends up. Once a minor player in the global recycling industry, Malaysia became the world’s top importer of used plastic after China’s ban on waste imports in 2018. Before the ban, it imported 200,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year. By 2018, that number had soared to over 800,000 tonnes, prompting government crackdowns.
New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment estimates that about 55,000 tonnes of plastic are collected for recycling in New Zealand each year, with around half exported. Customs data shows New Zealand’s plastic waste exports are decreasing, from about 50,000 tonnes in 2016 to just over 27,000 tonnes last year.
In 2024, about 15,000 tonnes went to Malaysia while Indonesia received just under 6,000 tonnes. Indonesia has this year implemented a ban on plastic waste imports, which campaigners fear will see an increase to Malaysia.
Each New Zealander sends about six kilograms of plastic waste overseas annually, three kilograms of which go to Malaysia. Like with paper, a legitimate global plastic recycling industry exists, as long as the materials are clean, sorted and of a high standard – such as clean plastic bottles and containers, generally made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET or number 1) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE or number 2).
Last year, New Zealand introduced standardised kerbside recycling rules across the country, including narrowing plastics accepted to types 1, 2 and 5. These higher-grade plastics can be recycled into new products, and in many cases end up back in New Zealand. The global Basel Convention since 2020 also introduced tighter rules around exporting low-grade and mixed plastic.
But even this recycling process concentrates dangerous chemicals into the new products and releases microplastics into the environment. Activists argue that much of the exported plastic waste ends up in places chosen for their lax environmental laws and cheap labour.
Packaging from New Zealand products found in an illegal dumpsite in the East Java village Pagak (Photo: Michael Neilson)
Pui Yi Wong, a Malaysian campaigner with the Basel Action Network, says the recycling industry in her country is way overcapacity and they regularly discover illegal dumps of contaminated foreign plastic waste.
“It makes us very, very angry. It’s a matter of justice. Why do we need to take in all this waste?” she asks. “Your countries have the resources. Why are you sending it here?”
Wong says it comes down to economic incentives. “They say, ‘It’s for the global circular economy,’ but really, why is it cheaper? Because utilities are cheaper, wages are lower, and laws are weaker.
“Workers lack personal protective equipment and risk their health to process waste for the so-called circular economy.”
Pui Yi Wong, a Malaysian campaigner with the Basel Action Network, at an illegal dump site south of Kuala Lumpur (Photo: Michael Neilson)
Despite those Basel Convention regulations, illegal imports to Malaysia of shredded plastics, often from electronic waste, are increasing. Since 2021, such waste has been dumped in urban and rural areas, palm oil plantations, and residential neighbourhoods.
Grace Foo and Mei Fang in the village of Selangor, an hour south of Kuala Lumpur, live with the consequences. Near their apartments, plastic waste is burned daily, filling the air with toxic smoke.
Foo, a breast cancer survivor, fears he health effects. “We cannot even open our windows,” she says. Fang says her young son developed nosebleeds after they moved to the area. “We just want fresh air. If we can’t have the right to breathe clean air, what is our human right?”
Malaysia’s environment ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Grace Foo and Mei Fang live in an apartment block in Selangor, Malaysia, where every day they see piles of plastic and electronic waste being burned, sending toxic smoke across the area.
In Indonesia, meanwhile, the government has sought to tackle plastic waste imports but not wastepaper. Its ban of plastic waste imports follows a similar ban in Thailand.
Novrizal Tahar, Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment director of waste management, says the ban on imports of plastic scrap will encourage the use of domestic plastic scrap in the recycling industry. Asked about plastic contaminants in paper imports, Tahar says the ban will also encourage recyclers to use all available plastics.
On the health impacts of current local disposal methods, Tahar says the ministry is communicating these concerns to local governments and will take enforcement action if necessary.
The Indonesian Plastics Recyclers Association and Indonesia Pulp and Paper Association did not respond to requests for comment.
Marsiah of Pagak, East Java, spends her days picking through scrap plastic for tiny pieces of cardboard to sell back to the paper mill (Photo: Michael Neilson)
Barney Irvine, coordinator of New Zealand’s Waste and Recycling Industry Forum, which represents the companies contracted by councils and other bodies to deal with recycling collected at kerbside and elsewhere, says that exporting post-consumer plastic is becoming more restricted.
“There are greater restrictions on what kinds of plastic can be exported and where, and major shipping lines are increasingly less willing to transport it.”
On reports of contamination in Indonesian paper mills, he says the industry takes its responsibilities “very seriously”. “We aren’t aware of New Zealand waste being dumped near factories,” Irvine says. “If such cases exist, we would be concerned.”
Where the forum’s members sell waste recycling directly to importers, they will visit the sites to ensure the materials are being handled responsibly, says Irvine. Where they sell via brokers, they are careful to only use “well-established, reputable players”, he says. There are also licensing and inspection regimes, and if the exports don’t meet the threshold they are rejected, he adds.
But campaigners in Indonesia and Malaysia say those regulations are not always enforced. The New Zealand Government has also admitted it has no idea what actually happens to recycling once it leaves the country.
New Zealand waste management campaigner Lydia Chai says while she believes most New Zealand exporters meet contamination thresholds, much could go wrong after the shipments leave the country.
“Once it leaves our shores, it is wishful thinking that we can monitor the final destination of a plastic bale,” she says. “If we cannot deal with the waste ourselves then surely the most logical thing is to significantly reduce the plastic that enters the country.”
In 2023, Chai petitioned the then Labour government for a ban on plastic waste exports to developing countries. It received the signatures of more than 11,500 people.
The Environment Committee recommended the government set a deadline to phase out unlicensed exports of plastic waste to countries beyond Australia, and develop a more comprehensive policy to avoid the creation of plastic waste. The new National-led government rejected the petition, saying a ban would be “challenging and risky” and it would instead focus on border controls and compliance.
The government has previously said it relies on exports because it lacks the infrastructure to recycle onshore. If it stopped exporting the waste it would simply go to landfill, Ministry for the Environment director of waste and resource efficiency Glenn Wigley has previously said.
The ministry does not hold up-to-date data on New Zealand’s recycling rates. In a statement, a spokeswoman said it was likely domestic recycling was increasing, as plastic exports had nearly halved since 2018 and new recycling facilities had opened.
(Image: Tina Tiller)
Environment minister Penny Simmonds says issues to do with recycling contamination are the responsibility of exporters and the importing country. On environmental and health concerns, she says those are also the responsibility of the importing country.
Asked about any actions New Zealand was taking to address concerns about waste exports, Simmonds says the government will be consulting this year on waste legislation reform proposals. Those proposals, released this month, do not mention waste exports.
Green Party spokesperson for zero waste Kahurangi Carter says the party is disappointed the government rejected the petition and “incredibly concerned” about the potential environmental and health impacts of waste originating in New Zealand.
“Successive governments have created a system where corporations extract resources, make disposable products, and then abdicate responsibility by exporting waste offshore,” she says.
“What we need in Aotearoa is greater investment into infrastructure that will enable greater resource recovery and reuse and greater ambition to accelerate towards a circular economy, where single-use plastics are eliminated as much as possible.”
Meanwhile, in Malaysia, the campaigner Wong says the “injustice of waste colonialism must end. New Zealand must take responsibility for its waste and ensure it is managed within its borders. There is a consequence for convenience that someone is paying for – even if they are not the ones using the plastic.”
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