www.guardianonline.co.nz
OPINION
21
Focus on waste-to-energy solutions Waste-to-energy was a hot topic this year at the WasteMinz Conference held in Christchurch in November. I spent an interesting three days at the Wigram Airforce Museum looking around the trade exhibits, listening to many of the keynote speakers. Envirowaste and EnviroNZ had a well attended site which attracted a steady stream of attendees looking for the latest developments in waste and recycling. Several global companies presented low carbon, wasteto-energy solutions to close the energy cycle as well as reduce the 57-plus per cent of our waste now going to landfill. This would then help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from landfills and reduce the impacts on climate change. It was interesting to see reports from a large clean burning waste-to-energy facility in the middle of Paris thermally treating the rubbish from the city and converting it into electricity and heating for residents and businesses.
Sheryl Stivens
Waste is a good space to start reducing our carbon footprint and getting food and garden waste out of the waste
stream needs to be a priority. A step in the right direction is that New Zealand’s old, discarded plastic bags and bottles will soon be given new life as fenceposts for farms. Material from soft plastic recycling bins, which are at New World, Countdown and The Warehouse in Ashburton, has been sitting in storage since about September after the Australian company that was accepting it became inundated with too much plastic. But the Packaging Forum, which runs the Love NZ Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme, has now partnered with new company Future Post to convert some of the stockpile into fence posts. Future Post was founded earlier this year by farmer Jerome Wenzlick who got the idea while struggling to build a fence on an old rubbish dump site. His wooden fence posts kept breaking but they weren’t hitting rocks, they were hitting plastic waste in the ground. Future Post is now able to use plastics to create
ECO EFFICIENCY
There are now 2200 wasteto-energy plants operating globally. Is this a solution for New Zealand? A waste-to-energy facility would certainly take care of hard to recycle materials like silage wrap and other contaminated low-grade materials from our farms and processing facilities. Taking this step would enable New Zealand to get above 80 per cent waste diversion from landfills. According to presenters at the conference New Zealand is now the 10th worst nation in the world for urban waste disposal and we have the highest CO2 emissions in the OECD.
Neil MacKenzie-Hall from Enviro NZ and Sheryl Stivens at the WasteMinz Conference. PHOTO SUPPLIED
a fence post that is better for the environment, while also reducing the amount of plastic sent to landfills. A standard post could be made out of 208 milk bottles, or about 1700 single-use plastic bags. The final post, containing about 10 kilograms of solid plastic, is expected to last about 50 years. The company can recycle single-use plastic bags, soft plastics, and milk bottles by processing them into a ground material. The blends are UV stabilised and extruded into a post. Future Post has also partnered with Fonterra to use old Anchor bottles. Last year the two companies worked on recycling milk bottles into shampoo, conditioner and body lotion bottles for Sky City hotels. Wenzlick said the partnership gave Future Post access to a steady supply of milk bottles and a customer base of 10,000 farmers in the co-operative. Sounds like a good example of Kiwi ingenuity and a winwin for all.
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