Recycling in New Zealand is “essentially a fraud” and food scraps diversion from landfills is “subsidised greenwashing”, a landfill expert tells BusinessDesk.
Waste Management chemical engineer Timothy Brake said “we can’t recycle our way out of the climate crisis”.
He said only a small fraction of our rubbish is recycled, and when it is, it’s often a mere delay to it ending in landfills, shedding microplastics in the environment in the process, he said.
Recycling a plastic drink bottle into meat trays, for example, he says delays the disposal of the plastic from the drink bottle by about a couple of weeks.
“We haven’t solved any of our problems by delaying the process.
