A regular series from Goodman Property examining environmental sustainability and how New Zealand business is working to get us there.
Today: Plastics
The problem: Plastics pollution; the effect on human health and the environment The expert: Dr Trisia Farrelly, an environmental anthropologist, political ecologist whose research has focused on waste management and plastics. She's a senior lecturer at Massey University, has also co-edited a book on plastic pollution and has been an advisor to the United Nations on marine litter and microplastics.
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The issues:
- "368 million metric tons of virgin plastics are being produced annually; production is expected to double by 2040," she says.
- Many plastics are toxic to humans. About 24 per cent of plastic items – including some food packaging have been identified as posing a risk to human health. A further 39 per cent are just not known about: "There's no clear evidence about whether or not they're hazardous."
- Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or hormone mimickers, are one of the key hazards associated with these additives and chemicals. "In very, very, extraordinarily low doses, these endocrine-disrupt.
We've all seen the soft plastic collection centres at supermarkets. What we haven't seen before is that all those soft plastic bags are part of an ingenious new effort to help rid the country and the world of plastic pollution: fence posts.
Jerome Wenzlick was originally a farmer puzzled by the fact that New Zealand cut down trees to make fence posts while planting thousands of tonnes of plastic in the ground (in landfills). He set out to change that. He and his colleagues at Future Post have found a way to use those soft plastics to replace wooden fence posts.
There is something like two million plastic bags used every minute in the world – and Wenzlick's natural farmer's inclination to look after the land saw him focus on the future: "As a farmer, I guess we need to be sustainable and it annoys me a bit – with farming getting a bit of the bad light that it does from a few bad apples. Most farmers do farm sustainably and look after the land and the soil. I guess it ties into what we're doing here with the posts – we're putting posts in the ground that aren't going to leach and poison the soil and into the water."
As a farmer, he found the quality of timber in fenced posts was not as good as it had been, "so we'd have timber that would break or rot prematurely. We also…treat our timber over here with CCA – copper, chromium and arsenic which is not very good for us human beings handling timber with that oozing out of it.
"I wanted a post that wouldn't rot in the ground and…something that didn't have all that poison."
His specially invented machine produces plastic fence posts that do not leach anything into the soil or water and last 50 years, compared to a maximum of 20 years for a wooden post: "Everybody from your normal dairy farmer, sheep farmer to the marine industry is using them. We've got Port of Tauranga using them where the ships berth. Kiwifruit guys, we've got orchard people. We've got the vineyards are really using a lot now."
The other highly recognisable benefit is that supermarkets have again started their soft plastics collection – with everything going to Future Post for this innovative transformation.
"As our production has grown, they've been able to put more and more bins out and grow with us," says Wenzlick. "The last thing they wanted was to put bins everywhere around the country again and get a big influx of plastic they had to store. I think they even dumped some of it last time. They're matching that with our demand now so what gets collected, 100 per cent of that comes here, gets turned into a post."
Nor is that the only ingenious piece of thinking and realisation by smart Kiwis. Rebecca Percasky is co-founder of The Better Packaging Company, who with their home compostable courier satchels as a flagship product, ship to 52 countries worldwide.
Her determination to fight plastics pollution meant that about four years ago "we realised we needed to bring something to market that people could deal with in their own backyards – and that's where we landed on a home compostable satchel." Partly plant-based, the Better Packaging materials break down in 180 days in home compost. They also make compostable bubble mailers, compostable labels, poly bags, garment bags and hanging garment bags.
Then last year "We…had this really neat whiteboard session where we went, 'Let's throw out any preconceived ideas. Even if the technology is not there, let's just come up with the ideal packaging solution'."
"On that wish list was to make packaging out of pollution and we said, 'let's go out and find that and let's create it'. That's what we've done – and we have, just in the last couple of weeks, launched a new courier satchel which is made out of 100 per cent ocean bound plastic waste." The company pays collectors from impoverished coastal communities, mostly in South East Asia, to collect the plastic – addressing pollution and poverty at the same time.
They also produce reusable mailing satchels called SWOP Packs (made from a completely new material developed by Better Packaging). "That was super exciting," says Percasky of the SWOP bag. "It's fibre-based with a plant-based coating so it's compostable and really low impact when it comes to the manufacturing but durable and heavy duty and can be used multiple times."
"Only eight per cent of our business is in New Zealand," she says. "The other 92 per cent is overseas and we have warehousing and distribution set up in The Netherlands, the UK, China, US, New Zealand and Australia - that services about 80 per cent of the global market."
Footprint: Business Sustainability is a new podcast series from Newstalk ZB and Goodman Property. Episode 2: Plastics is out now.